Hi there!
I’m a strategic consultant, keynote speaker, and educator with extensive corporate experience in the field of futures thinking and innovation. Science fiction, creativity, and the art of shaping the world to come inspire me. I am genuinely curious and open about the future and spend my days exploring topics that hold the potential to transform the world.
“My field isn’t the past — it’s the future.”In my mind’s eye, I see the future as an expansive archaeological site with many possible futures buried and waiting to be discovered.
I can never know what I will find and it is exciting. The tools of my trade are imagination and speculation leading me towards new narratives and future artifacts showing us what might be. They act as witnesses to distant futures allowing us to experience how it would feel to live in such futures and engage in discussions about their relevance.
And perhaps, just perhaps, you’ll glimpse a trace of wonder — the echo of a future yet unwritten one day and you know that Markus, the future archaeologist, had a hand in shaping that reality.
My job is…to be confused.
to be fascinated by the odd things.
to look at the wrong things.
to wonder.
to have time.
to be indifferent.
to be bored.
to create.
to store useless knowledge.
to be pretentious.
to treat everything with care
to capture moments.
to work under constraints.
to make things visible.
not to be commercial.
not to become an expert.
not knowing what my future is.
... to remeber
Photo by Robert Gose
Since 20 years at the forefront of technology, innovation and futures thinking.
In 2014, I founded Y Think Tank, a future-oriented platform within the largest Swiss bank UBS.
Leading interdisciplinary teams, we developed futuristic concepts in the financial sector with a strong societal focus, following the principles of critical and speculative design.
The developed concepts were communicated externally through future artifacts. The photo shows me at our exhibition of future artifacts at the UBS head quarters in Zürich (2022).
I have a robust technological background, backed by an extensive experience in various IT roles at UBS and at the IBM Silicon Valley Lab in California. I hold a degree in Computer Science from the University of Stuttgart, Germany.
Previous Roles:Before Y Think Tank, I founded and held the position of lab manager of the IT R&D lab within UBS Group CTO. During this time, my focus was on researching cutting-edge technologies in the “High-Performance Computing” (HPC) domain. Specifically, I explored areas such as cloud computing, very large databases (VLDBs), big data, parallel programming, and application virtualization.
Other Engagements:Since 2023, I serve as a board member of swissfuture.
Since 2022 I am a guest lecturer at the HWZ CAS New Work.
Between 2017 and 2023 I was a member of the advisory board at the HWZ Institute for Digital Business (Hochschule für Wirtschaft Zürich) .
