BIF-4 Wrap-Up: People & Stories Take Center Stage

Posted by Chris Flanagan on October 17, 2008

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. Our thanks go out to BusinessWeek's Bruce Nussbaum, Mavericks at Work author Bill Taylor and our own chief catalyst Saul Kaplan, who welcomed 28 storytellers and some 320 participants to Providence for a two-day conversation about creating innovation and driving change.

If I 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 I know, it wasn't just talk.

Alas, our dinner party has come to a close but the relationships are just getting started. (We've got your number!) 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.

Our chief catalyst Saul Kaplan summed it up best : "I used to think that we could enable large-scale change and create more innovators by proselytizing. 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."

My thanks go out to the very talented storytellers and audience participants who made this year's summit such a success. In my next post, I'll provide a linked list to all of the stellar innovation bloggers who helped capture the experience. Video transcripts will be available in the next couple of weeks.