Julia Goga-Cooke

Julia is an academic, journalist, design thinker and entrepreneur. Julia teaches Design Thinking and Foresight & Strategy at Loughborough University London, and Design Thinking Accelerator and London- New York, Dual City Design Management at Central Saint Martins, University of Arts. She leads the London based innovation academy Gconsultancy Innovation, an IOEE Academy that helps organisations bring innovation to their DNA, by creating innovation skills and capabilities, mindset and culture.

Julia brings together a range of disciplines she has mastered during her career. After a career in academia and PhD in Linguistics, Julia worked for UN, and later on for the BBC in London, where she served for 16 years as broadcaster, producer, editor and leader. Julia led the BBC Albanian Service for 10 years before becoming BBC Global News Editor and Senior Editorial Advisor for BBC World Service in 42 languages, BBC TV, and BBC Online.

Taking a sabbatical in 2008, Julia joined Wharton Fellows and spent a year at Central Saint Martins and London Business School, studying Innovation and Entrepreneurship, after which she set up her own enterprises. She co-founded and managed for 5 years the Future of Work Research Consortium which brought together executives from 80 global corporations and academics in a collaborative space, both physical and virtual, to research and design how we will be working 20 years from now, and what skills and capabilities do we need to develop today in order to be fit for the future.

Her passion for life long learning took her to MIT to study Collaborative Innovation Networks. She is an MIT SOLVE Fellow. In 2015 Julia set up Albanian Innovation Accelerator as a foundation to help young people to use technology and design thinking to solve problems in their community and start new enterprises.

Academic background

Julia started her academic career in Linguistics at the University of Tirana. She taught English Phonetics and Phonology for 10 years and her PhD is on Comparative Linguistics. She authored two textbooks on Phonetics and was a co-author on Curriculum Design for English in Secondary Schools.

After a career in Journalism and Futures Research, she returned to academia in 2015, teaching Design Thinking , Foresight and Strategy and the Collaborative Project at Loughborough University London, and Design Thinking Accelerator at Central Saint Martins, University of Arts.

Current research and collaborations

There are two current research and collaborations that Julia is involved in:

• Research on the Creation of Entrepreneurship Ecosystem at AIA in Albania and the results from the application of the COIN Model.
• Research on Performance Labels project with Imperial College.