Next Ideas Labs

Japhet Ash­er is a pio­neer in cross-plat­form sto­ry­telling, with a career span­ning doc­u­men­tary, ani­ma­tion, inter­ac­tive design, AR, and gen AI. An Acad­e­my Award nom­i­nee and Emmy win­ner, he rein­vent­ed ani­mat­ed nar­ra­tive with MTV’s Liq­uid Tele­vi­sion and lat­er led dig­i­tal inno­va­tion at BBC Children’s, launch­ing CBBC and CBee­bies on YouTube and build­ing large-scale inter­ac­tive con­tent strate­gies. He con­tributed to the launch of Meta’s AI Stu­dio and pre­vi­ous­ly devel­oped the first inter­ac­tive TV appli­ca­tions for Tele-TV. Japhet con­sults and devel­ops new IP through Polar­i­ty Rever­sal. His Sub­stack blog, The Con­text Mak­er, explores cre­ative prac­tice in the age of intel­li­gent media.

Eliza Jäp­pinen is the Head of IP Devel­op­ment at Signum Growth AD8 POP and CEO of Vis­i­ble Realms, an enter­tain­ment com­pa­ny cre­at­ing dig­i­tal first IP across roblox games and ani­mat­ed con­tent. She is the cre­ator behind the vir­tu­al band Stu­dio Killers, which has over 12 bil­lion views on Tiktok. 

With 30 years in game devel­op­ment and tech, Kel­ly’s con­tributed to renowned fran­chis­es like ​“Tomb Raider”, ​“Trans­form­ers” and ​“Can­dy Crush”. She skill­ful­ly applies gam­i­fi­ca­tion across diverse ver­ti­cals, from fash­ion to enter­tain­ment. Pas­sion­ate about advanc­ing tech, she co-found­ed Aequa­land, pio­neer­ing NFT stan­dards, and serves as CTO of NAK3D, seam­less­ly inte­grat­ing lux­u­ry, games and metaverses.

As Chief Inno­va­tion Offi­cer, Cathal Gaffney leads BBF Labs, a new divi­sion ded­i­cat­ed to shap­ing the future of ani­ma­tion across Brown Bag Films’ glob­al stu­dios. He over­sees the devel­op­ment of new pro­duc­tion work­flows and artist-first tools designed to enhance qual­i­ty, effi­cien­cy, and cre­ative col­lab­o­ra­tion. A co-founder of Brown Bag Films, Cathal helped scale the stu­dio into a glob­al leader in ani­ma­tion. An Oscar nom­i­nee and mul­ti­ple Emmy win­ner, he lat­er became Chief Oper­at­ing Offi­cer of 9 Sto­ry Media Group, over­see­ing pro­duc­tion, HR, and tech­nol­o­gy. Cathal brings deep cre­ative, oper­a­tional and tech­no­log­i­cal exper­tise to this pio­neer­ing role.