Most of what blocks disruptive progress isn't a bad idea. It's that the people who could solve it together never end up in the same room. Innovation leaders often build in isolation, inside institutions designed for problems a generation old, and the peers who'd understand the pressure are scattered across sectors that don't normally talk. Disruptive Diner puts you in a problem-solving room with other innovators.
THE EXPERIENCE
Unlike a webinar, The Disruptive Diner is an idea-provoking conversation with people you don't usually sit with. Two innovators fire off a sharp point of view in a Pecha Kucha talk (20 slides, 20 seconds each), then open the room for questions, pushback, and ideas worth stealing.
WHO ATTENDS
Disruptive Diner sessions are intentionally small gatherings of founders, researchers, investors, subject matter experts, and intrapreneurs from established companies. The attendees are manually curated to ensure an optimal range of viewpoints and relevant experience.
WHY ATTEND
Your best ideas rarely come from people who already agree with you. Disruptive Diner puts you in an intimate room with innovators from spaces you'd never otherwise cross. The point is to trade provocative ideas not pitches.
THE DISRUPTIVE DINER
Upcoming Sessions
AI IntrapreneurThu, Oct 22Online, link provided once you're confirmed
Digital Infrastructure: The Win/Win Nobody's Building YetWed, Dec 02Online, link provided once you're confirmed
Stay in the Loop
Not every session in the 2026–2027 series has its registration page open yet. Tell us what you're interested in and we'll reach out when it does.
BUILT FOR INNOVATORS
More than ten years ago, Openly Disruptive founder Dan Reus noticed that the most innovative people were often the most bored at the events built for them: events made for the audience, not the presenters. Disruptive Diner started as an in-person lunch for a few dozen ambitious people exploring gamification, and has since covered deep tech, novel business models, and alternative financing and IP structures. Now online and open to innovators anywhere, these sessions keep the same innovator-first, intimate, participatory core it started with.
THE 2026-2027 SERIES
Each session below tackles a different opportunity area. Sessions with an open date are ready for requests to attend. Sessions still in planning are open for early interest instead (see Stay in the Loop below).
1. The AI Intrapreneur
AI is more accessible than ever inside the enterprise: everyone's vibe-coded something by now. This session pulls back the curtain with intrapreneurs who got real AI work funded, adopted, and trusted inside a big organization: what actually landed, what nearly didn't, and why.
2. Digital Infrastructure: The Win/Win Nobody's Building Yet
Growing electricity demand is justifying real investment in the grid in a way it hasn't in a long time, and data centers are driving much of it. That makes this a rare reinvestment moment: a chance for power, land, and water to become shared wins instead of zero-sum fights. A utility innovation leader and a site strategist who helped turn a contested St. Louis data center into a community win share what it takes to get there. The conversation then extends the same question to the fiber and network layer that shapes a community's digital quality of life.
3. Engagement, Value, and Digital Twins
A twin is just a more expensive dataset exposed to "agents" unless it aligns the people around it to create transformational value. Most digital twin conversations start from the enterprise's needs: control, risk mitigation, and throughput. This session asks who a twin actually serves. Drawing on examples from patient-controlled health twins to airports and theme parks, it explores whether a twin owned and steered by one entity can measurably benefit the individuals and communities it represents, or risks becoming a bloated attempt at control. What can you build if you see digital twins as platforms for mutual value creation instead of collections of data?
4. CTO: Technology and Trust Converge Around Value
As agentic AI starts transacting on our behalf, trust (identity, permission, context) stops being IT hygiene and becomes the asset agents trade on. A documented incident this summer, roughly 1,200 AI agents secretly colluding to cheat an evaluation and then hacking two companies' infrastructure, shows what happens when nobody owns it. What happens when the CTO's remit flips from Chief Technology Officer to Chief Trust Officer, from a cost center to a profit center, and the CISO, CFO, and CTO converge around value creation instead of running three separate budgets?
5. Beyond Governmental Space Markets
For more than 75 years, government has driven investment and value creation in space. Now launch costs are falling dramatically, and off-Earth capabilities are growing, from in-orbit refueling and servicing to satellites that can interpret what they see. What new economic activity does that open up beyond government markets, and how can companies large and small adapt to the challenges and opportunities it creates?
6. Spatial Finance: Proof of Everything
Verification is the raw material of capital formation. Before anything can be financed, traded, or insured, someone has to prove it's real: the reserves backing a token, where a product actually came from, how efficiently a data center uses power and water, or what satellites show happening on the ground. Earth observation data, for example, is just a map until someone turns it into reduced risk and/or real value. This session explores the innovators designing those proofs, and what it takes for a verification metric to earn enough trust to carry value.
7. Spatial Finance: The Trust Economy
Once a metric is trusted, it can become a market. Tokenized Treasury funds, tradeable indices, and exchanges for differentiated commodities are already being built on verified data. Each one needs legal packaging, pooling, and exchange architecture that most industries have never had to design. The second of two complementary Spatial Finance sessions follows verified data from proof to market. What markets can you build once what you measure can be trusted?
8. An Ecosystem Approach to Reshoring
Reshoring is becoming an architecture choice as much as a policy one. In semiconductors, startups are mass-producing small factories instead of betting everything on one mega-fab. Critical minerals is following, with modular extraction and distributed recycling networks replacing sites that take years longer to build. This session brings together the innovators inventing that new infrastructure. What can you build once reshoring becomes a design choice, not just a funding one?
