Ruben Horbach

About Ruben Horbach

Ruben Horbach started his career working for Apple in Amsterdam where he developed a profound interest for new emerging technologies. He continued his passion as a digital consultant and public speaker for a variety of companies such as Axe, Bacardi, Red Bull, Intel and Philips and government entities as the Dutch Ministry of Internal Affairs and Kingdom Relations and the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs. Working with the Dutch government resulted in a universal future vision between the different departments around demographic, economic and technologic drivers and trends in education, transportation, sustainability, healthcare and public safety leading up to the year 2020.

His relationship with the government also pointed Ruben towards Prince Constantijn of the Netherlands (the younger brother of the current Dutch monarch, King Willem-Alexander) and Henriette van Notten (Senior Policy advisor) who invited him to participate at the first ideation sessions for an organisation that was later known as Startup Delta. When The Netherlands held the presidency of the European Union in 2016 the week long event was a great success with speakers as Tim Cook (Apple), Eric Schmidt (Google), Travis Kalanick (Uber) and Ruben himself.

Ruben moved to London in 2015 where he worked for Somo, the leading agency that delivers mobile transformation programmes for global brands including Audi, BP, Easyjet and The New York Times. At Somo Ruben made quick progress from Innovation Executive to Head of Innovation while transforming the role of the team within the business. His teams researched the advantage of the latest technology and experimented with mobile, wearables, Virtual and Mixed Reality, Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things in response to rapid changes in consumer and employee behaviour to create actionable innovation for clients.

At the end of 2018, he joined the German IT business ETECTURE to run their Innovation & Digital Strategy department. At ETECTURE he was responsible for implementing a new digital
innovation strategy, building an innovation hub, representing the company at international conferences and supporting c-level management and shareholders as strategic sparring partner. After moving back to Amsterdam, Ruben has worked at Gravity, a boutique digital innovation agency as Innovation & Strategy Director while also working as a self-employed innovation consultant.