Episode 215 – Virtual Reality, 5G and other innovation trends – Interview with Head of Ecosystem and Trend Scouting, Nokia

MySecurity Media’s Singapore Correspondent Jane Lo speaks with Leslie Shannon, Head of Ecosystem and Trend Scouting, Nokia, based in San Francisco, USA.

Leslie heads up Ecosystem and Trend Scouting, Corporate Strategy. Based in Silicon Valley, she investigates new technologies, including AR/VR, AI, self-driving cars, Blockchain, and all manners of other advances, looking for the examples that will offer significant new opportunities to entities in the telco sector.

Leslie entered the mobile communications world as a billing database analyst in the early 1990s. She joined Nokia Australia in 2000 and became the manager of the FutureLab, an early developer incubator in the days of WAP, GPRS and 3G. Building on her first-hand technical and business experience of the reality of bringing applications to market, she developed an analysis service for Nokia that examined success and failure factors for operators bringing mobile data to market for 4G that proved so successful that Nokia created a new department around her work. While in this role, she was based in Finland and worked with over 100 operators in more than 60 countries.

Always on the lookout for all the ways that new thinking and tech are going to disrupt and enhance our world, she travels and speaks globally, both in researching new tech and in sharing her findings with Nokia telco customers.

Born in Manhattan, Leslie has a BA in Psychology from the University of Virginia and a Master’s Degree in the History of Art from Yale University. She was an undefeated five-time champion in the American television game show “Jeopardy!” in 1992 and was invited to return to the show to compete in a tournament for one million dollars as one of the show’s “most memorable contestants” in 2002 and again in 2014. (She didn’t win, but still had a lot of fun.) She also got four questions away from willing a million dollars on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” in August 2017.

Leslie lives in Santa Clara, California, with her husband and their two mobile-data enthusiast children.

Podcast recorded on 19th August 2020.