Valerie Fert is the founding member and CEO of International Focus, an international strategic management company which focuses on emerging countries and transformation trends. Valerie graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure and  the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, two French institutes for higher education, and was awarded degrees in history and in philology of ancient western Semitic languages. Before establishing International Focus, she worked in media and publishing, where, she filled several senior executive positions in La Vie - Le Monde Group over a twelve-year period. She formed International Focus in 2003 in which she involved high-level experts from various fields and countries, some of whom were already members or supporters of the organisation. The organisation is appreciated for its diversified knowledge vision, its strategic synthesis and perspectives principles as well as its cartographic expression which gives an instantaneous overview of global data.

Dominique Foray is the Director of the "Chaire en Economie et Management de l'Innovation" at EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), vice-chairman of the expert group «Knowledge for Growth», a group of prominent economists chaired by Commissioner J. Potocnik (DG Research of the European Commission). Previously, he was a principal analyst at OECD. CV