Register now for BIF-4: Meet Mark Ecko, Jason Fried, Tony Hsieh, Bruce Nussbaum, David Yaun and many more

Last year's sold out BIF-3 Summit hosted 300 participants from 174 organizations for an intimate 2-day conversation about collaborative innovation. This year, we will meet again for our fourth annual Summit taking place on October 15th and 16th in Providence, Rhode Island.

I am so excited about this year's lineup. We're bringing together many of today’s most compelling innovators, business model renegades and true transformers who will reveal their secrets of success through personal storytelling.

The BIF-4 line-up includes:

John Abele
As a leader of the Grunion expedition, Abele recently rediscovered the WWII submarine his father disappeared on in 1942. Abele is also the retired founder and chairman of Boston Scientific Corporation.

Ruby Bridges
In 1960, six-year-old Ruby Bridges Hall became the first African American child to desegregate an elementary school. Today, she continues to keep the spirit of tolerance and diversity alive through the Ruby Bridges Foundation.

Steve Bendt & Gary Koelling
Founders of Best Buy’s Blue Shirt Nation, an in-house social network with 20,000 employee participants.

Deborah Brooks
Brooks is co-founder of The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research. She is reshaping the pace and logic of research devoted to curing Parkinson's disease, funding over $90 million in research grants to date.

Kathy Cloninger
Cloninger is the Chief Executive Officer of Girl Scouts of the USA and leading the organization to fulfill its mission to build girls of courage, confidence, and character, who make the world a better place.

Curt Columbus
Columbus is artistic director of Trinity Repertory Company. His adaptation of Dostoevsky’s "Crime and Punishment" was awarded a Joseph Jefferson Award for best new adaptation and is published by Dramatists’ Play Service.

Joseph F. Coughlin
Coughlin is founder and Director of the MIT AgeLab - the first multi-disciplinary research program sponsored by government and business to understand the behavior of the 45-plus population as decision-makers, consumers, patients, caregivers, advisors and technology users.

Marc Ecko
Ecko’s passion for impacting youth culture is today represented in everything from publishing to multimedia, and from fashion to philanthropy.

Jason Fried
Fried is the founder and CEO of 37signals. Fried is a passionate leader in the field of simple, clear and elegant web-based user interface design. He spearheaded the concept, design and development of Basecamp, 37signal’s web-based project management tool for designers, freelancers and creative services firms.

Jeffrey Hollender
After his tenure as president of Warner Audio Publishing, Hollender acquired a small mail order catalog of energy conservation products, Renew America, which eventually blossomed into Seventh Generation.

Tony Hsieh
Hsieh is the CEO of Zappos.com. Under his leadership, Zappos has grown gross merchandise sales from $1.6 million in 2000 to $840 million in 2007 by focusing relentlessly on customer service.

Cat Lainé
As Deputy Director of Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group, Lainé is helping people in developing countries get environmentally sound and affordable access to energy, sanitation and clean water.

Jacqueline Novogratz
Novogratz founded the Acumen Fund, a non-profit global venture fund that uses entrepreneurial approaches to solve the problems of global poverty, proving that small amounts of philanthropic capital, combined with large doses of business acumen, can build thriving enterprises that serve vast numbers of the poor.

Lewis Gordon Pugh
Pugh was the first person to complete a long distance swim in every ocean of the world and over a period of 20 years he pioneered more swims around famous landmarks than any other swimmer in history.

Richard Satava
During his 23 years of military surgery Satava has been an active flight surgeon, an Army astronaut candidate, MASH surgeon for the Grenada Invasion and a hospital commander during Desert Storm, all the while continuing clinical surgical practice.

Clay Shirky
Shirky is a writer, consultant and teacher who has spent years talking about the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. He teaches New Media as an adjunct professor at New York University’s (NYU) graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP).

John Wolpert
Wolpert headed IBM’s Extreme Blue, an incubator for talent, technology and business innovation. Most recently, Wolpert has been working with YET Lab bringing together early-stage business investors, an elite recruiting organization and an accelerator lab for high-intensity business innovation projects.

Richard Saul Wurman
Wurman is an information architect with a singular passion for making information understandable. Presently, RSW is working on his latest project 19.20.21, an attempt to standardize the information available on 19 cities that are expected to reach 20 million inhabitants in the 21st century, giving readers tools to easily compare and contrast them.

David R. Yaun
Yaun directs the IBM Corporation’s worldwide internal and external communications programs related to innovation and technology leadership. He is the lead executive responsible for the company’s annual Global Innovation Outlook program; manages the company’s ground-breaking global “InnovationJam” program; oversees the Genographic Project, a joint research program with the National Geographic Society; and serves as an executive sponsor for IBM’s “ThinkPlace” idea generation program.

Fast Facts about the BIF-4 Summit

Co-hosted by BusinessWeek Assistant Managing Editor Bruce Nussbaum and “Mavericks at Work” author Bill Taylor, BIF-4 will connect you with innovation leaders and change agents from across the country.

Storytellers have only 15 minutes on stage to share a personal story about how they turned an idea into an innovation.

The BIF Summit doesn’t pay storytellers or hosts to participate.

Held at the historic Trinity Rep in Providence, R.I., BIF-4 is limited to 300 participants, making the Summit the place to exchange experiences and ideas in an intimate, relaxed and informal location

Early registration ends August 15th. (Don't delay! Last year' summit was sold out.)

Learn more about how you can participate at this year's summit. Full registration details here.

Posted June 9, 2008 08:02 AM by Chris Flanagan | Permalink