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October 11, 2007

Bloggers swarm the Business Innovation Factory's Collaborative Innovation Summit

The scene in Providence yesterday at Trinity Rep's downstairs theater as Brown graduate and author Steven Johnson speaks.

After the first day of the third Business Innovation Factory's BIF-3 Collaborative Innovation Summit at Trinity Rep, brains were buzzing.

I asked a few people afterwards at a packed reception at Gracie's for their reaction to the storytellers and the day.

"I feel very enriched by being here but I couldn't tell you how. In a few days, maybe.

"It was intellectually interesting."

-- Ed Murphy of Westerly, RIMES

"I'm a technologist, but this is not about the technology. It's about communication enabled by the technology."

-- Hilary Mason, Assistant Professor, New Media/Computer Science, Johnson & Wales University

"I'm not sure how (these ideas) will translate, but they don't have to."

-- Kathleen Van Gorden of Little Compton, KVG Communications

"...How vulnerable innovators are... The architect was great."

-- Euan Semple, who felt he was home in this roomful of people.

The architect -- Chris Benedict -- was "overcome" during her presentation, paused to gather herself and with the room hushed, pushed on. It was a wonderfully real moment, made moreso in contrast to the practiced presentations of some more familiar with the speaking circuit. Euan was there to talk about creative disruption in the BBC, an old friend I'd met at last after having known each other's blogs for years.

Like many of those quoted above, I feel fertilized. Something nonlinear happened there. It didn't require networking, although lots of that went on in the short breaks between clumps of 15-minute presentations. It was something like art -- when the work acts as a trigger that opens something in the observer; something like the Web itself, which makes what one of us knows available to all as common knowledge; and something else, an evolution that spreads intelligence like a virus and explains why discoveries can be made nearly simultaneously and independently by innovators a world apart and unaware of each other's work.

Saul Kaplan, BIF's "chief catalyst," opens the conference.

Saul Kaplan, now executive director of the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation, was the driving force behind its founding when he was EDC's business development director. BIF charges hefty fees to businesses for membership. Yet there was very little emphasis from most of the speakers today on money and business, and almost no technology language or jargon spoken. The focus was on the process and experience of innovation.

The view from blogger row.

I spent the day trying to soak it all in and put some of it back out in realtime, in a theater seat in the dark in Trinity Rep's downstairs theater, with a laptop on my thighs, a mouse whose sides cycle through a series of colors (I hate laptop pointers and touchpads), a digital camera with a card you pull and stick in the laptop's USB port, and a burning desire to rewind.

In a comedy of errors, I was saving my raw posts periodically, as I would on my own blog. But saving "unpublished" looks like "to be edited" on projo.com's news blog. Sometimes only what I had made coherent was published. This miscommunication was my fault for not thinking to put a "Do not publish" note on top of partial posts.

I had trouble getting on the network, and consequently missed taking photos of some of the first presenters.

Fortunately, blogger heaven up there in the top rows on the right was full of people doing the diligent thing. The Blogjam of invited bloggers, some publishing on their own blogs, together covered far more than my bits, which perhaps served only to introduce this concept to a mainstream audience reading the daily news stream.

Rachel Clarke, sitting to my left, was a stenographic whiz. Providence Geeks co-founder Jack Templin, sitting on the other side of her, and I shared our awe of her efficiency. ("Lots of practice," she told me.) Rachel's bulleted quotes at License to Roam are a play-by-play of each presentation.

As more posts come in this evening, these are the more considered, reflective ones.

I'm going to try to pull some of the hive's work together below. This was a grueling process, and some storytellers fell victim to blogging fatigue by virtue of their placement in the program. No slight is intended to those whose presentations coincided with our exhaustion.

Providence Police Chief Dean Esserman

Blogged by:

Rachel Clarke: BIF and Dean Esserman

Brian Jepson: Dean Esserman: Connecting Police with the Community

Lois Kelly: Beyond 911: innovating police forces, bringing back neighborhood beats

Jeff De Cagna: Podcast interview with Colonel Dean Esserman, chief of Providence Police Department (6:35)

Matt Cottam, cofounder and principal – Tellart (design consultancy)

Blogged by:

Rachel Clarke: BIF and Matt Cottam

Brian Jepson: Matt Cottam: An Actor Prepares

Euan Sample, former head of Knowledge Management for the BBC

Blogged by:

Rachel Clarke: BIF and Euan Semple

Erica Driver: Lessons in Enterprise Web 2.0 Adoption From The BBC

Co-host, WSJ columnist -- and Warwick native -- Walter Mossberg, right, interviews Jason Fried of 37 Signals.

Jason Fried and Walter Mossberg

Blogged by:

Rachel Clarke: BIF and Jason Fried by Walt Mossman

Lois Kelly: Walter Mossberg and Jason Fried: Why are we stuck with bloated software crap like Outlook?

Josh Catone: BIF -3: Jason Fried - Software Should Be Opinionated

Jeff De Cagna: Podcast interview with Jason Fried of 37signals (9:14)

Sheila Lennon: BIF-3: WSJ's Walter Mossberg

Jay Cohen, Under Secretary for Science & Technology, Department of Homeland Security

Blogged by:

Rachel Clarke: BIF and Jay Cohen

Chris Benedict, architect of energy-efficient buildings

Blogged by:

Brian Jepson: Chris Benedict : Getting More for the Planet within Budget

Eric Bonabeau, founder of Icosystem, author of Swarm Intelligence.

Blogged by:

Sheila Lennon: BIF photos: 'Green architect'; 'Feed' 'zine founder

Steven Johnson, Feed, The Ghost Map, Outside.in

Blogged by:

Rachel Clarke: BIF and Steven Johnson

Brian Jepson: Steven Johnson : The Ghost Map

Dave Balter, Dan Heath, Paul English and Bill Taylor palaver.

Mavericks at Work:

Bill Taylor, author of Mavericks at Work

Dan Heath, author of Made to Stick

Dave Balter, founder and CEO, BzzAgent, Inc. (word-of-mouth marketing firm)

Paul English, Founder, the gethuman database (direct lines to companies' customer service people), Co-Founder & CTO, Kayak.com (comparative travel search)

Blogged by:

Rachel Clarke: BIF and Mavericks at Work

Josh Catone: BIF -3: Dan Heath - Think Inside the Box

Brian Jepson: Dan Heath: Thinking Inside the Box

Matt Mason, former pirate radio dj and author of The Pirate's Dilemma

Blogged by:

Rachel Clarke: BIF and Matt Mason

Brian Jepson: Matt Mason : Don't Tase' Me, Guys (Mason slipped that way new meme into his story, to appreciative giggles from the audience.)

Sheila Lennon: BIF -3: Pirates as innovators

Juan Fernando Santos, Chief Creative Officer, Studiocom (digital marketing agency)

Blogged by:

Rachel Clarke: BIF and Juan Fernando Santos

Richard Saul Wurman, left, and Walter Mossberg. Wurman, of Newport, is the author of 81 books. His latest project is 19.20.21.

Blogged by:

Sheila Lennon: BIF-3: Mossberg interviews Richard Saul Wurman

Overviews:

Steve Hardy: BIF-3 - Wednesday

Lois Kelly: BIF3 Collaborative Innovation Notable Quotes

Erica Driver: Serendipity: A Critical Innovation Success Factor

Isabel Walcott Hilborn: Notes from BIF-3

Isabel Walcott Hilborn: Bif -3 Afternoon Session Notes

If you've blogged and I haven't found it, please let me know and I'll add a link to your post(s). And please save me a seat tomorrow. I'll miss the first storytellers, but I'll be there later.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 3:31 AM | Permalink