Zane Smilga has more than 15 years experience in the area of innovation management. Currently she manages the competence center of innovation-business engineers at Verhaert New Products & Services in Belgium. She consults international companies on innovation strategy and product management projects across multiple industries (advanced materials, medical, FMCG, ICT etc.) Next to her consulting work, she manages Copernicus Incubation Programme, a grant scheme of European Commission.  As expert, she contributes on building a European open innovation platform for SMEs and European space acceleration and entrepreneurship platform Astropreneur.

Zane gives trainings and speaks at business events on innovation management and business modeling topics. She holds a Master degree in innovation management from the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University in the Netherlands and her professional experience is gained in various cultural environments (Belgium, the Netherlands, Latvia, Kenya).