Debi Bester
Debi's expertise is in leading global organisations across diverse sectors to innovate with, for and around the customer.
Bringing years of award-winning experience with her, she inspires her clients and their customers to collapse the walls, walk in each other's shoes and co-create the kind of value no-one else can.
Based in London, Debi is CEO of innovation agency Department of Change, where she focuses on brand, product and cultural innovation. She is also Director of Creativity & Innovation at coaching and training consultancy The Reinvention Works.
She works with companies just starting up, those disrupting the market and those reinventing themselves to reclaim their lead. Among her current clients are King Games, WaterAid, EDF Energy, EY, Virgin Media, Virgin Wine, Direct Line and Experian.
Having started out in South Africa as a journalist working at the height of apartheid, Debi also served as Secretary of the Democratic Party in the country's biggest constituency. She then moved into advertising, working as a creative at McCann and DMB&B before joining Proximity BBDO, where she became the first Innovation Director appointed to the executive board of a UK comms agency.
Over the years, she has won over 110 international awards for innovation, creativity, strategy and research. Among her collection are Grand Prix and Golds from Cannes Lions, New York Festivals, London International Awards, MediaGuardian, Market Research Society, iab and the DMA. (Though perhaps she's proudest of winning an Index on Censorship Prize awarded by late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes.) Contact Magazine said of her work that it "signals how brands revolutionise the way they communicate with their audiences".
Today she also shares those revolutionary ideas by speaking at Conferences, most recently in Serbia; judging awards shows, from the Cannes Lions to the DMAs; designing the 'Campaign for Great British Copywriting' as Writer-in-Residence of the DMA; and running the School of Change, a training programme for young innovators.