This weekend Babson’s President Len Schlesinger will head to Saudi Arabia and present to a global audience of entrepreneurs. Schlesinger will share the findings from the Entrepreneur Experience Lab, which was launched back in 2010, to put the voice and the experience of real world entrepreneurs at the center of an ongoing effort to design, develop and experiment.
Following the Summit, get your hands dirty with Business Model Innovation collaborators, Saul Kaplan and Alex Osterwalder in an exclusive post-Summit workshop. You'll learn to translate your BIF-8 Summit inspiration into action for you and your organization. Act now, and gain access to this exclusive workshop for free, only available to those who register by January 31, 2012!
One of my favorite tools for exploring a systems model is sketchmodeling. Sketchmodeling is a way to take quickly take ideas from your head and put them into the world so that you and others can interact with them. This allows you to quickly iterate a model, generate shared understanding, and reduce the complexity of highly interconnected systems.
Neither a CEO of a Fortune 500 or the “MBA type” I worried I’d have trouble sinking my teeth into the first few chapters of The New Capitalist Manifesto. As I read I realized; although the book is tailored to the topic of capitalism, the lessons are relevant in other aspects of life. Haque starts us off painting the picture of a lackluster corporate world in desperate need of a paradigm shift.
Do you remember being stuck at the kids' table for Thanksgiving dinner growing up? I do. There were always too many of us to all sit around one dinner table, so we had a secondary table off to the side, sometimes even in a separate room, to which the younger generation was relegated. I remember asking every year if I would be able to sit with the grownups.
The Skpye screen was grainy, the connection was less than ideal—still, all the way from Pakistan, Umair Haque blew me away. Literally hanging on his every word, I found myself completely captivated by his passion. After the Summit I knew there was one thing I needed to do—read Haque’s the New Capitalist Manifesto.
Following the BIF-8 Summit, get your hands dirty with Business Model Innovation collaborators, Saul Kaplan and Alex Osterwalder, in an exclusive Workshop digging into the challenges and opportunities of business model innovation, an emerging but still poorly understood discipline.
Thinking. We all do it. We may even be pretty good at it. We build models like OODA, create formal systems of logic, and blind people with our science. Most of these methods of thinking fall into the category of reductionist thinking. The Scientific Method, easily the most well known reductionist method, has thrust us from believing rats spontaneously generate from grain to believing the universe spontaneously generates from something in a hot dense state. On the whole reductionist thinking and science have pioneered incredible advances in medicine, technology, economics, agriculture, and quality of life.
On October 29, 2011, 40 students, ages 12-22, travelled from all corner’s of Rhode Island’s public education system, to answer one simple question: can we create a student experience that enables all students to thrive? Their insights and passion for the design challenge will inspire you.
I’m tired of all the “Woe is America” stuff – we’ve lost our innovation edge, we’re stagnating, etc. All I see around me is the opposite – incredible innovation in products, services, processes and business models. It’s just not in the mainstream media. That’s what makes the annual BIF conference so important: 30 plus stories of amazing, cool, disruptive, transformative innovation models. I thought I’d share a glimpse of the many “business” lessons I learned from some ‘non-traditional business’ stories at BIF-7.
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