What if the best way to come up with a brilliant plan for the future of your company was to hire a sci-fi writer? Ari Popper does just that. He connects companies with storytellers to create visions and prototypes of what the future of their products and customers might look like. Ari previously ran the market research company, Brainjuicer USA, but it was a science fiction writing course at UCLA that made him realise the power of creating compelling stories for companies. I was introduced to Ari after a speech I gave at Visa’s incredible new San Francisco headquarters. In the spirit of a Silicon Valley startup, Visa had commissioned Ari’s team to create an interactive, high impact data wall that provided a real time view into the company’s universe. When I visited him at their lab in Burbank, we chatted about the power bringing ideas from fiction to life as prototypes, comic books, and immersive installations.

‘Walk with me’, said Tim Kring, gesturing for me to follow him into the edit suite, where he and his team were busy putting the final touches on his new show, Heroes Reborn. If you were one of the 76 million people watched the original Heroes series during its three-and-a-half-year run, you would already know exactly who Tim is. Tim is one of Hollywood’s most successful writers and producers, best known for shows like Strange World, Crossing Jordan, and Touch. He is also an Emmy award winning pioneer in transmedia storytelling. When we finally sat down for a chat, we talked about the shifting behavior of TV audiences in the digital age, how the next generation think about entertainment, why interconnectedness is such a big theme in his work, and how he uses storytelling as a strategy to create social change.

Michael Keferl runs the Tokyo office of the global innovation consultancy, Mandalah. But I knew him from the early 2000s, when he was the genius behind one of my favourite, and in fact, one of the most popular blogs in the world at that time - CScout Japan. CScout was the go-to emporium for all things weird and wonderfully Japanese. When we caught up in Tokyo, Michael gave me a behind the scenes tour of the city’s latest retail, technology and subcultural trends. Later that day, sitting at a sidewalk cafe in Shibuya, we debriefed on what we saw, discussing the evolution of mobile technology and payments in Japan, interactivity and politeness, why ramen fanatics keep notebooks, Astro Boy’s influence on modern robotics, the fall of Mt Gox, and why this tiny island continues to be a source of inspiration to innovators.

What does it take to create a great culture? If anyone knows, it is Robert Richman. He wrote the book on it, The Culture Blueprint, and after embedding himself at Zappos, co-founded Zappos Insights, the program that helps leaders learn the secrets behind the online shoe company’s game-changing employee culture. Over breakfast at the Mondrian Hotel in West Hollywood, we talked about the system dynamics of what connects people, why great cultures are noisy, how Zappos is able to constantly re-invent itself, creating a startup mentality inside big companies, the power of re-imagining meetings, and why culture is like an operating system.

Refik Anadol sculpts with data, not stone. When he frets about permanence, he is not concerned about the effects of wind and rain on his structures, but whether his algorithms and data sources will continue to be relevant as things change around them. Refik is foremost of a new generation of 21st century artists that have begun to creatively interpret a data-driven world, using its native protocols. Originally from Istanbul but educated at UCLA, he is best known for his recent collaborations with Frank Gehry, Microsoft and the LA Philharmonic to stage an immersive orchestral performance that projection mapped the inside of the Disney Hall, based on real time musical data and the live movements of the conductor. I visited Refik in his new studio in Silverlake where we talked about computation in art, the challenge of designing algorithms that stand the test of time, the beauty of a hundred years of seismic data, and how one might make emotions visually manifest with a little help from a 48 channel EEG and a team of neuroscientists.