Community
blog
Since our inception, BIF has been collaborating with Trinity Repertory Company here in our hometown of Providence, RI. Our two organizations share DNA, with the same deep belief in storytelling and performance art as an ideal platform for community engagement and self-organized community action. This year to inform BIF’s Personalized Medicine by Design (#PMxD) project and our PMxD Maternal Health Program we’re partnering with Trinity Rep and Joe Wilson Jr., an amazing actor (and friend) and the theatre’s Coordinator of Activism through Performance, on America Too: It’s Our Health.
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We are excited to announce that Ben Siegel is joining BIF as Chief Impact Officer. Ben will focus on integrating emerging technology and new funding strategies into our business model design projects, starting with Personalized Medicine by Design.
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The Business Innovation Factory (BIF) is pleased to announce that Founder and Chief Catalyst, Saul Kaplan has been named a Founding Member of The IEEE Fair Trade Data Initiative, a collaboration to develop a standards framework governing the fair trade of human and personal data.
Podcast
Joe Wilson Jr. shares his journey of becoming an actor in this episode of the Business Model Sandbox. He shares how the stage for him, became a platform for community engagement.
Podcast
Poet, singer, and educator, Yolanda Wisher masterfully alchemizes the beauty of people and place into poetry, connectivity, and story. Lending her voice and vision to BIF, she'll be leading one of our first immersive explorations into health and wellbeing with our Personalized Medicine by Design (PMxD) project.
Case Study
Plan International is an independent development and humanitarian organization that advances children’s rights and equality for girls around the world. Their challenge and opportunity is to design with and for the Indian diaspora community in the US to prototype a new model for better engaging existing and acquiring new members to support their global mission.
Case Study
Our collaborative exploration of personalized medicine puts individuals and families at the center of the design process and bridges the exciting space between enabling agency at the consumer level and leveraging emerging technologies to transform customer experience and outcomes.
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Business Innovation Factory (BIF), in collaboration with The School of the Possible founded by Dave Gray, Hatch founded by Yarrow Kraner, and Overlap founded by Michael Dila, is launching a project to explore the opportunity for a transformational personalized medicine business model.
Video
An adventurer and storyteller of life and work, Vika, a native-born Ukrainian, is a MOTH StorySLAM winner and contributing writer for VICE.
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"Stories are opportunities to hear ideas and to connect different ideas all in one place. A good story will inspire you, inform you, and activate you. Stories drive change by activating people to learn more that they can do."
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“I’ve been both a victim of violence through [the legacy of] the Holocaust and then was top dog when it came to the Palestinians. I’m part of the weak and part of the strong; that’s a very humbling experience.”
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"I love to tell stories, and have since I was young. Acting in itself is implicit in telling a story. Being an actor you have to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, empathize with a totally different character. And everyone has the potential and the ability to listen to and to tell stories. That makes us special."
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Theater and Art must be by, for, and of the people. Art is not a luxury item which exists solely for the purpose of consumption.
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"Story is the thing that can wake people up, that has an opportunity to bring a higher level of consciousness."
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BIF's Chief Market Maker takes the stage to emphasize community and our role as citizens to co-create a better future.
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Bridging the gap between community, equality, and innovative next practices to change viewpoints.
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In the days after Hurricane Harvey's catastrophic rainfall and flooding forever changed the landscape of Houston, TX, Angela Blanchard set up a shelter in the NRG Center to house 10,000 people. How long did she have to set it up? 24 hours.
Blog
While healthcare leaders understand the imperative of business model innovation, it is often scary to disrupt a large system that has been in place for years. When the motto of healthcare is “do no harm,” it is hard to be the guinea pig to test out new business models and next practices. Our goal was to help them make the business model innovation process safer and easier to manage.
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This (100k Ideas) is our favorite type of model here at BIF because it taps into what we call “the gold in the grey space” — working across sectors and industries to meet true citizen needs while transforming each of the latter.
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When a child has autism, it can be hard for families to do normal things like go out to dinner or meet other families that have similar pain points and struggles. “We often feel isolated and alone,” she revealed. “We just need a place where families can be families.”
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How might play spaces become the civic spaces that bring diverse people together, encourage connection, and shared experiences?
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With the shift in the healthcare landscape to more personalized, self-directed behavioral changes, asking people to take more ownership of their health, it's imperative that we look to ensure we're providing people with the right tools to do so. Open Source Wellness is one such organization seeking to do just that.
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What does collaborative innovation actually look like in practice? Part two takes a deeper dive into the right conditions needed in order to not only succeed, but that is needed in order to successfully come together to scale transformative change.
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What does collaborative innovation truly mean? Understanding what it means, and more often than not what it doesn't mean, is imperative to accelerate the pace of change.
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When we connect outside our normal silos, we build our network of capabilities and gain the most by experiencing change through the lens of others. Transformational change is a generative act that we can all participate in.
News
Our Citizen Experience Lab is pleased to announce that it will once again be partnering with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri, to work with a group of stakeholders to co-create a shared platform for advocacy around innovation and entrepreneurship in the state.
Podcast
Saul Kaplan and Michael Margolis discuss storytelling as it relates to our personal brand identity, how it can be implemented effectively at a business level, and in our communities.
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We need flexible, adaptable, and agile public services, truly designed to meet citizens where they are and when they need them — whether confronting homelessness or any other calamity, ideally well before a crisis takes hold in a way similar to how the affordable housing shortage has imperiled citizens nationwide.
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You have to get to know the community with which you are working, the people that live there, and what their aspirations are before you can begin any sort of sustainable work in community transformation.
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Roberto Rivera’s personal story is about the expansion of true consciousness in one young person, who was tagged early on as learning-disabled, then shunted from one alternative school to another. He got into trouble, and almost slid into an abyss of statistics that presumed his ultimate disconnection from family and community — from the “good life.”
Case Study
In collaboration with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation BIF supported a collaborative effort between environmentalist groups and New England fisherman to create a shared vision for sustainable groundfish stocks in New England.
Case Study
In 2016, BIF worked Children's Health to help them understand the experiences, identify service gaps, and explore opportunity spaces for low-income families with a medically complex child.
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By engaging families in the design and delivery of models, we've learned that families know the challenges they face in striving to be well and what the needs of their communities are.
Case Study
Today’s young adults face uncertainty as they transition out of high school and are forced to navigate their next steps to determine how their interests might translate into a viable career path.
Case Study
At BIF, we believe that great stories can change the world. With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), the Business Innovation Factory is exploring how storytelling and narrative methods can improve healthcare and contribute toward building a Culture of Health.
Case Study
Connected Aging is an exploration into the aging experience, including a deep, ethnographic dive and solution concepts for reimagining aging through the lens of social connection and participation.
