Collaborative Innovation Summit Draws Sold-Out Crowd to Providence
Related Media Coverage and Links
October 21, 2008 | Print this page | Share This |
On October 15-16, 2008 at Trinity Rep in Providence, Rhode Island, the Business Innovation Factory's BIF-4 Collaborative Innovation Summit brought together many of today's most compelling innovators, business model renegades and true transformers to reveal the secrets of innovation success through personal storytelling.
This week we certainly caught a glimpse of author William Gibson’s famous line: "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed." For two days, despite all the economic turmoil going on outside, the future seemed more apparent and vividly bright with hope. And It wasn’t just the stories or the emotive storytellers—it was the purposeful random collisions among BIF-4 participants that produced the magic.
There were so many ideas and connections that emerged at our fourth annual Collaborative Innovation Summit. BusinessWeek's Bruce Nussbaum, Mavericks at Work author Bill Taylor and BIF's chief catalyst and RIEDC Executive Director Saul Kaplan, welcomed 28 storytellers and some 320 participants to Providence for a two-day conversation about creating innovation and driving change.
If one had to sum up the value of the BIF-4 experience it's this: we were a room full of unusual suspects who came together to recombine ideas in creative ways in order to figure out a way to solve some of big, gnarly problems. It was refreshing, it was stimulating and it wasn't just talk.
Alas, the dinner party has come to a close but the relationships are just getting started. Progress on the issues that really count will only happen if communities — from a local, regional, national and global perspective — collaborate to make them happen.
"I used to think that we could enable large-scale change and create more innovators by proselytizing," said Kaplan. "But that doesn’t get you past the buzzwords. I now believe in sorting the world to identify the innovators across every imaginable discipline, then finding ways to connect them in purposeful ways. That's the BIF community."
