Community

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.

In the spirit of transformation, BIF is excited to announce that in 2019 it is shifting from a single Collaborative Innovation Summit in Providence, RI, to create opportunities to inspire collaboration and innovation through smaller, more intimate gatherings across the country.

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.

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.

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

An adventurer and storyteller of life and work, Vika, a native-born Ukrainian, is a MOTH StorySLAM winner and contributing writer for VICE.

"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."

“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.”

"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."

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.

"Story is the thing that can wake people up, that has an opportunity to bring a higher level of consciousness."

BIF's Chief Market Maker takes the stage to emphasize community and our role as citizens to co-create a better future.

Bridging the gap between community, equality, and innovative next practices to change viewpoints.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

How might play spaces become the civic spaces that bring diverse people together, encourage connection, and shared experiences?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.