ABOUT THE SUMMIT
Crossdive is Turian Labs’ annual foresight and insight summit, bringing together business leaders, policymakers, researchers, designers, startup founders and strategy practitioners to make sense of a world where legacy models no longer hold.
The future is arriving through overlapping extremes. Geopolitical realignments, AI, demographic transitions, urbanisation, and resource pressures are no longer isolated trends. They are interacting, amplifying one another, and reshaping how societies, markets, and institutions function.
CrossDive explores these global shifts through India’s lens: a country where scale, speed, diversity, digital adoption, and institutional change make the future visible in unusually intense ways.
The summit combines two lenses. Foresight helps decode emerging signals and map multiple plausible futures. Human insight grounds those futures in lived realities, changing behaviours, and evolving expectations.
The goal is not to predict the future. It is to improve the quality of decisions made today.
Where insight meets
anticipation
Expanding Aspirations
Convenience and acceleration now shape everyday urban life. Apartments act as offices, gyms, studios, and social venues, and shrinking households carry more care and emotional load alone. Some gain control inside this compression. Others lose recovery, stability, and room to reset.
Beyond Intelligence
The world is delegating more decisions to machines every day, with AI generating, deciding, and acting across daily life while guardrails lag behind. As intelligence becomes abundant, attention turns to what AI cannot replace: individuality, human judgement, and accountability.
Ageless Living
The fixed arc of growing up, working, and retiring is dissolving. Lifespan, healthspan, careers, and finances now stretch at uneven speeds. People are improvising ninety-year lives no system was built for, and age-based market segmentation is rapidly losing its predictive power.
Defragmentation of the World
The world is actively choosing reorganisation over the old global default. Trade blocs reform around shared values, and supply chains now prioritise resilience over efficiency. Every Build, Buy, or Ally decision carries geopolitical weight, and new clusters, coalitions, and interpretations of value are quietly forming.
THE THEMES
Meet the
speakers
Dr. Sari Arho Havrén
Geopolitical Strategist, China Expert, and Foresight Practitioner, Business Finland
Dr. Sari Arho Havrén is a geopolitical strategist, China expert, and foresight practitioner with extensive experience across Europe and Asia. Her work focuses on great-power competition, China’s global ambitions, geopolitical risk, and shifting international alliances.
Dr. Anu Raghunathan
Scientist and Systems Biologist, CSIR–National Chemical Laboratory
Dr. Anu Raghunathan is a scientist and systems biologist whose research spans synthetic biology, metabolic engineering, and cellular systems. Her work offers a unique perspective on how biotechnology is reshaping health, sustainability, and the future relationship between humans and living systems.
Sagar Vishnoi
Co-Founder, AI policy and political communications expert, Future Shift Labs
Sagar Vishnoi works at the intersection of AI, public policy, digital governance, and political systems. His work explores how emerging technologies are reshaping democracy, elections, institutions, and civic participation.
Dr. Kaustav Sengupta
Head/Director-Insights & Associate Professor, Futurist and color psychologist, NIFT
Dr. Kaustav Sengupta is a futurist, cultural strategist, and design academician with over 25 years of experience in foresight research, youth culture, and emerging consumer trends. His work explores the socio-cultural and behavioural shifts shaping India’s future.
Martino Bellincampi
Co-Founder & CEO, AI strategist, foresight practitioner, IZILab, Milan, Italy
Martino Bellincampi is a strategist, entrepreneur, and foresight practitioner working at the intersection of data, artificial intelligence, and long-term strategy. As Co-Founder and CEO of IZILab, he helps public institutions and businesses use futures thinking, big data, and emerging technologies to navigate uncertainty and build resilient, future-ready organizations.
Manoj Kewalramani
Chairperson & Research Fellow, China studies expert, Takshashila Institution
Manoj Kewalramani is a China scholar and geopolitical analyst whose work explores Chinese politics, technology, and global power shifts, with a focus on what China's rise means for India and the evolving Indo-Pacific order.
Dr. Ambuj Chaturvedi
Director, Professional Education, Johnson & Johnson MedTech India
Dr. Ambuj Chaturvedi is a healthcare innovator with experience across Johnson & Johnson MedTech India, Medtronic, Covidien, IKP Knowledge Park, and Fortis Healthcare. His work spans clinical innovation, medtech education, emerging market R&D, and healthcare management.
Dhaval Kothari
Co-Founder, Design researcher and speculative futures strategist, Lagori Collective
Dhaval Kothari is a futures practitioner and design researcher with over 13 years of experience across social research, law, impact investment, behaviour change, and design. His work focuses on participatory research, strategic foresight, and building imagination infrastructure for communities and organisations.
Srinivas Venkatram
Founder & CEO,
Illumine Knowledge Resources
Srinivas leads a research and consulting firm focused on social impact & livelihoods. His work focuses on enabling large-scale human and institutional transformation through cognitive empowerment, helping people and communities build the capabilities for future. Srinivas is an alumnus of IIT Bombay and IIM Ahmedabad.
Ayaz Basrai
Co-Founder, speculative design and cultural research expert, The Busride Design Studio & The Busride Lab
Ayaz Basrai is a designer, researcher, and co-founder of The Busride Design Studio. His work spans architecture, interiors, immersive environments, heritage conservation, and futures research. Through The Busride Lab, he explores the intersection of design, culture, technology, and emerging futures, bringing a unique perspective on how built environments shape human experiences and societal change.
Manoj Kothari
Founder & CEO, Strategic foresight expert, Turian Labs
Manoj Kothari is an innovation and futures strategist, and an IIT Bombay and NID Ahmedabad alumnus. With over two decades of experience, he helps global brands, startups, and governments identify emerging opportunities and build future-ready strategies through design thinking and strategic foresight.
Harsh Mittal
UX Research, Google
Harsh Mittal is a UX researcher at Google, working at the intersection of technology adoption, digital inclusion, and emerging-market behaviour. His research across India, Brazil, Mexico, and Indonesia has informed products serving millions of users, offering unique insights into how rising aspirations, local cultures, and digital ecosystems shape everyday lives.
Divya Chadha
Director, UX Research,
JioHotstar
Divya Chadha is a design leader and Director of UX Research at JioHotstar. An engineer-turned-design-researcher from MIT Institute of Design, Pune, she works across user research, social megatrend spotting, and future scenario building, having shaped products for Google, Samsung, Mahindra, Medtronic, and Stryker.
Steven Lichty
Strategic Foresight Consultant, Co-Founder & Managing Partner,
REAL Consulting Group
Dr. Steven Lichty is a strategic foresight practitioner and researcher with over 25 years of experience working across 100+ countries. He advises governments, international organizations, and NGOs on foresight, systems thinking, governance, and resilient futures, with a strong focus on Africa.
To Be Revealed
A globally recognized voice shaping the future of innovation, To be announced
A leader whose work is influencing industries, policies, and the future of design. Stay tuned as we unveil one of our most anticipated keynote speakers.
THE LOCATION
Pune, India
Pune, with a metropolitan population of over 7 million, is one of India's most significant economic and knowledge hubs. It brings together advanced manufacturing, automotive industries, IT services, startups, higher education, scientific research, and deep-tech innovation within a single urban ecosystem.
Strategically located within the Mumbai–Pune–Nashik growth corridor, Pune benefits from seamless expressway connectivity to Mumbai and Nashik, placing it at the center of one of India's most dynamic economic regions. The city is well connected to all major Indian metros through Pune International Airport, while Mumbai's global aviation hub is just a few hours away.
Direct international connections to destinations such as Dubai and Singapore further strengthen Pune's role as a gateway between India and the world.
Beyond economics, Pune is a city of ideas, culture, and civic leadership. Rooted in the traditions of Bhakti (spiritualism) and Shakti (power of self-determination) and shaped by a legacy of learning and social reform, it offers a unique blend of cultural depth and future-facing ambition. Few cities are better positioned to host a conversation on India's future and its place in a rapidly changing world.
CrossDive is convened by Turian Labs, a Pune-based strategic foresight, design research, and UX strategy consulting firm.
For over a decade, Turian Labs has helped global organizations understand changing human needs, discover emerging opportunities, and design strategies for an uncertain future. Our work combines strategic foresight, ethnographic research, user experience studies, behavioural insights, and design thinking to help leaders make better decisions in complex environments.
Strategic foresight
built in Pune (India)
Turian Labs has also created platforms for dialogue and collective sensemaking. These include IndiaNxt, one of India's early conferences on megatrends and innovation strategy, and DIVE, an ongoing series of conversations exploring creativity, innovation, science, technology, and society through diverse lenses.
CrossDive builds on this legacy, bringing together policymakers, entrepreneurs, business leaders, researchers, designers and technologists to make sense of the forces shaping India and the world.
At Turian Labs, we see the future not as something to be predicted, but as something to be interpreted, designed, and shaped.