Tech­nol­o­gy is no longer a si­lo and it is not ex­clu­sive to those in the ICT field. Tech­nol­o­gy has an ef­fect on every­one, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the way busi­ness is done."You can't just be in the tech busi­ness. You just can't be in the soft­ware busi­ness," said fu­tur­ist Gerd Leon­hard. Da­ta, he said, is a tril­lion dol­lar busi­ness that af­fects the con­sumer, the man­u­fac­tur­er and the busi­ness­man."We don't need reg­u­la­tion to tell us what the de­fin­i­tive road for the fu­ture is," he added.

Leon­hard, a lead­ing voice in next-gen­er­a­tion dig­i­tal busi­ness mod­els, will be in T&T next month as one of the head­lin­ers at 4th T&T ICT Busi­ness and In­no­va­tion Sym­po­sium 2014 No­vem­ber 9-11 at the Hy­att Re­gency, Port-of-Spain. The sym­po­sium is host­ed by the Min­istry of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy, in part­ner­ship with the Na­tion­al In­for­ma­tion and Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Tech­nol­o­gy Com­pa­ny Ltd (iGovTT) and the e-Busi­ness Round­table.The sym­po­sium's theme is smarTT So­lu­tions for a Smart So­ci­ety and Leon­hard will help bridge the gap in un­der­stand­ing a na­tion­al ICT plan and how it solves so­ci­etal chal­lenges.

Leon­hard, on his many speak­ing tours through Eu­rope and the US, talks about op­por­tu­ni­ties and chal­lenges of a net­worked so­ci­ety,sus­tain­able busi­ness and cul­tur­al ecol­o­gy, so­cial me­dia and com­mu­ni­ca­tions, TV/film, ra­dio and broad­cast­ing fu­tures, mo­bile con­tent and com­merce, in­no­va­tion, lead­er­ship and en­tre­pre­neur­ship, con­sumer trends.He co-au­thored the best-sell­ing book The Fu­ture of Mu­sic (2005) and au­thor of The End of Con­trol, Mu­sic 2.0, Fric­tion is Fic­tion and The Fu­ture of Con­tent (2011, Kin­dle-on­ly).Leon­hard is al­so the host of The­Fu­tureShow and MeetingOfThe­Minds.tv, as well as the Founder of Green­Fu­tur­ists (a high-lev­el group of lead­ing fu­tur­ists with a fo­cus on de­vel­op­ing sus­tain­able busi­ness mod­els).

Leon­hard's back­ground is in mu­sic and the mu­sic busi­ness. In 1985, he won Berklee Col­lege's Quin­cy Jones Award and spent ten years work­ing as a pro­fes­sion­al gui­tar play­er, com­pos­er and pro­duc­er. He then caught the In­ter­net bug and be­came a dig­i­tal me­dia en­tre­pre­neur and start-up In­ter­net CEO, based in San Fran­cis­co, for sev­en years.In 2002, Leon­hard re­turned to Eu­rope and start­ed his ca­reer as a fu­tur­ist, keynote speak­er and strate­gic ad­vi­sor. He now trav­els around the globe speak­ing at ma­jor con­fer­ences and events, com­pa­ny re­treats, sem­i­nars and in-house train­ings.For fur­ther in­for­ma­tion about the Caribbean's pre­mier ICT Con­fer­ence, vis­it the Web site www.ict­sym­po­siumtt.gov.tt