The 15th Annual Greater Palm Springs Economic Summit promises to be one of the most insightful and enlightening conferences of 2019. Whether you’re a business leader in the region or looking into moving or expanding your business here, this year’s Summit program will demonstrate why Greater Palm Springs is one of the best places to work and live.

Set for Tuesday, November 19 at the Palm Springs Convention Center, the morning event will reveal the annual economic report and forecast and showcase our region’s business attraction strategies and goals to ‘focus on creating a prosperous future’ in Greater Palm Springs.

Seating is very limited.  Registration information is available here.

Featured Speakers

Robert Rippee

Robert Rippee, MBA, Ph.D. Candidate, is the Director, Hospitality Innovation Lab & Director, eSports Lab at the International Gaming Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV).

As Director of UNLV’s acclaimed Hospitality Innovation Lab, Rippee guides multi-disciplinary students with the application of new and emerging technologies to solve real-world problems in the hospitality and gaming industry. He is also UNLV’s primary architect and inspiration for its newly announced Black Fire Innovation Hub, scheduled to open at the Harry Reid Research Park in Fall 2019. In his tenure at UNLV, not only have his courses produced some of the most innovative ideas ever to address hospitality problems, but they have provided almost two dozen invention disclosures and filed patents on multiple projects.

Rippee is the former Senior Vice president of Marketing for Las Vegas Sands Corporation, bringing more than 25 years of innovation experience in hospitality and gaming along with a robust network of advisors and mentors across venture capital, big tech, big hospitality, and gaming. He serves as a board advisor and consultant to several technology startup companies.

Rippee is a Doctoral Candidate at UNLV researching consumer behavior and human learning. He holds an MBA from the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business and an undergraduate degree in Finance from The University of Wyoming. Robert also is the co-inventor of innovative and disruptive technology in the consumer wine sector, with eleven patents pending on the technology. He is also a decorated veteran, having served as a pilot in the United States Navy.

Manfred W. Keil

Keil is an Associate Professor and the former Chairman of the Faculty at the Robert Day School of Economics and Finance at Claremont McKenna College. Professor Keil is a Fellow at the Rose Institute of State and Local Government and a Research Associate at the Lowe Institute of Political Economy at CMC. He has a history of working on various aspects of business cycles and comparative economic performance (Journal of Macroeconomics, Oxford Economic Papers, Southern Economic Journal, and Canadian Public Policy). More recently, Keil has written papers on the employment effects of minimum wages and the recession of 2009. Both papers were listed among SSRN’s top 10 downloads in their respective categories.