Imre Porkoláb profile photo

Prior to a military higher education, he graduated from the 270-year-old Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, and subsequently obtained postgraduate degrees and PhDs from several domestic military and civilian universities.

He began his military career in 1993, serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has spent much of his career creating and developing the special operations capability for the Hungarian Defence Forces.

Since July 2011, he has served in the US at NATO's Strategic Transformation Command, serving as the NATO Allied Transformation Command (SACT) representative to the Pentagon, where he liaised with the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Department of Defence and the Washington-based Priority Research Institutes.

During his time in the US, he completed a senior management course at Harvard University and a degree in organisational innovation at Stanford University.

Since 2018, he has been leading the transformational work of the Hungarian Defence Forces in the field of defence innovation, and since October 2022 he is the Ministerial Commissioner for Defence Innovation of the Ministry of Defence, responsible for developing Hungary's defence innovation strategy and developing the defence innovation ecosystem in the region.

In December 2022, he was elected Vice-Chairman of the Board of the Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (NATO DIANA) and since February 2023 he is the CEO of the Defence Innovation Research Institute Nonprofit Ltd.

He is an expert on guerrilla warfare and counter-terrorism in the context of special operations capability development, related leadership theory – mission command other than traditional, successful change management in the V.U.C.A. environment, and innovative methods of organizational transformation and its applicability to business.

Social media

Other Speakers of the Conference