Storytelling
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Liz was 15 when she got pregnant. She was as much an American as a Cambodian feeling the constant pull between the two cultures. Liz’s familial support was very important during this time as she was caring for herself, her family and her baby. They did the best they knew how without knowing all of the risks of teenage pregnancy.
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A picture is worth a thousand words. Alex Tsiaras takes us into the world of digital storytelling, revealing how digital imagery makes health science understandable and can help improve overall health and wellbeing.
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Cory Pesaturo is certainly an endangered species. Tune in as Cory brings us into the worlds of a record-holding accordion player, a self-proclaimed "snow weenie," a racing enthusiast, and an extreme sledder.
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Aithan Shapira brings us back to the moment where he lost everything, and shows us how he was able to pivot, redefining and mastering his craft all because of an abandoned, unusable life preserver.
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Just like her hometown, the Bronx, Ivelyse Andino is powerful and resilient. After working within and navigating the healthcare system herself, Ivelyse realized that she had to make a difference from within her community.
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Philip Sheppard masterfully captures the beautiful essence of humanity, through song and story. Warning! You will get goosebumps.
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"We don't think our way into new ways of living, we live our way into new ways of thinking." A 7th generation Rabbi, Irwin Kula lives his way into the intersection of science and spirituality.
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A long-time friend of BIF, Joe Wilson Jr. passionately unearths his roots and how he discovered his true self and his unmatched dedication to art and activism.
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Tori Drew unravels her journey from corporate New York to a small non-profit in Providence, Rhode Island, and the two worlds couldn't be more different. In the true nature of "pulling the thread," Drew explains how BIF has re-discovered how to create impact by creating a woman-centered maternal health and wellbeing project.
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Dr. Ami Bhatt reveals how a patient's story of struggling tells us so much more about navigating the current healthcare system than simple statistics. In this story, Bhatt describes the journey of a patient and how introducing technology actually provides a deeper human level to the healthcare system.
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Jeff Sparr returns to the BIF stage to share how harnessing the power of creativity, art and storytelling makes it so much easier and much more productive to support and talk about mental health.
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Darden Smith and Mary Judd beautifully alchemize words about wellbeing from the #BIF2019 community into song and share it with us on the summit stage, then provide insight into why storytelling in the form of songwriting has been immensely impactful in the veteran community.
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Josh Goldberg passionately shares the "10 Truths to #StruggleWell" he learned while working closely with veterans and relives his own journey to find purpose and mental wellness at the BIF2019: Wellbeing Summit.
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Mark Brand shows us the immense power of words, and how the systemic problems of our society reside in our language, and in our inability to view the community as a unit. Brand gives us the tools that we need to take action and to inspire positive change.
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Valerie Tutson kicks off the #BIF2019: Wellbeing Summit by reminding us to interact with each other and say "I see you with my eyes, I see you with my heart, I see you in front of me, I respect you."
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Jeff Leitner provides a humorous, yet truly illuminating perspective on the "most important things that you never think about:" the unwritten rules of society. Enforced only by social cues, these unwritten rules influence human behavior more than you might think. Tune in to find out more!
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Richie Etwaru lives in the future, but he comes from the past. He uses history to help better understand what is to come and influence a better tomorrow. Etwaru deconstructs how he became a defender of the 31st human right: legal ownership of one's own inherent human data.
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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.
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Lending her voice and vision to BIF, she'll be leading one of our first immersive explorations into health and wellbeing with an upcoming Story Cure, bringing in local community in West Philadephia.
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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.
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Signals are our most basic communication platform. Be it 0’s and 1’s or smoke signals, we humans often find the ways to communicate simply what we can’t otherwise say.
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A regular on the Food Network, Iron Chef, and Cutthroat Kitchen, Simon Majumdar has been traveling the globe with random collisions centered around a common great connector - food. Finding the space of combining and recombining great ingredients, Simon shares his world views with using a common, delicious language we can all sink our teeth into.
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It's safe to say that all of us have left #BIF2018 changed. Inspired. Hopeful. Ready to self-organize and create the conditions necessary for all of us to freely combine and recombine our capabilities to make the world a better place.
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Three-time Grammy Award winner Prince Charles Alexander connects the human condition from the great words of Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. to the modern movements of our time through music, lyrics, and social injustices.
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Quentin Robinson is breaking down social, cultural, and economic barriers through dance.
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Work across sectors and industries to meet citizen needs while transforming each of the latter, finding true gold in the grey spaces.
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Creating opportunity sometimes takes an outside voice to help you find your own. Anderson shares her life, lessons, and hope.
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Blending intentional design with best practices in equity to address the changing nature of work.
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Brand shares his message on the importance of sustainable business models that make a difference, while also creating successful bottom lines.
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No stranger to the BIF stage, Smith is a singer-songwriter whose 32-year career has produced 15 critically acclaimed albums and is also the founder of SongwritingWith: Soldiers.
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A proponent of education and underserved populations, Kassir brings together communities with her powerful, gracefully delivered words.
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Creating immersive experiences through multimedia and original music to share stories from WWII Japanese Incarceration camp survivors.
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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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On a mission to make the imaginative a reality, Rita is a futurist, helping leadership teams around the world align values and goals.
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Working through new systems to find a space to feel empowered, Wilson humbly breaks it down what it means to find your will to grow and go further than you thought possible.
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With a keen eye toward the future, Ben Seigel is focusing on human rights and financial inclusion.
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A true leading thinker and doer, Comstock joins us as a true innovation junkie to talk through what it means to have curiosity in the workplace today, the fluidity we should all be adopting in our personal and professional lives as well as the true meaning of transformational change.
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Making the most out of your #BIF2018 experience: I make a list of no more than 5 insights that are so powerful that I must act on them. I create an intention for what that action looks like, define the barriers and risks of acting in new ways, and I hold myself accountable for starting.
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One of our core beliefs is that a good story can change the world. We’ve never prescribed what our storytellers have to say, nor will we. At #BIF2018 we are modeling how to enable self-organized purposeful networks. It’s up to us to accept the responsibility to convert random collisions from the Summit into powerful and purposeful collaborations.
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This September 13-14, 500 innovation junkies will convene in Providence, Rhode Island to listen to 32 storytellers share their passionate stories about transformation at the annual Business Innovation Factory (BIF) Collaborative Innovation Summit. BIF’s Patient Experience Lab is most excited to listen and learn from these 5 speakers from the healthcare industry:
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Sharing his passion, purpose, and inspiration, Philip Sheppard goes beyond the notes as he stops by for an in-house recording session, complete with a few previews of his latest work.
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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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Welcome to Integration Nation! Hear from members of the Integration Design Consortium, a group of five passionate design teams who are advancing equity, innovating with purpose, and shaping the future of education reform.
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Here at the BIF, we believe that storytelling can be an incredibly powerful tool for building empathy. It can open people to new perspectives, create shared experiences, and promote insights and learnings.
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A fellow pharmacy school graduate and colleague from early in my career, George Zorich, is writing a book advocating for pharmacy schools to integrate entrepreneurship education into their standard curriculum. A section of the book will contain stories of pharmacy school graduates who leveraged their education in surprising ways, catalyzing non-traditional and interesting career paths. George asked me to share my story. I’m honored to be asked and I found it invaluable to reflect on my own convoluted career path. Are you doing what you originally set out to do in college? If you’re like most people you’ve had to reinvent yourself multiple times over your career. The world of work is changing faster than ever. What’s your from….to story? Here’s mine.
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The BIF Summit storytellers will push you to the edge of your thinking and help you find comfort there. In the interactions BIF refers to as ‘Random Collisions of Unusual Suspects’, you’ll find yourself conceiving, sharing, and learning about new ideas and ways of thinking.
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The BIF Summit is designed to allow attendees to break free from their silos. There are storytellers and stories, not speakers and presentations. There are no pre-set theme s or topics. Within this environment, attendees can boundlessly explore new ways to make themselves, their businesses, and our world a better place.
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At the Summit, I have time to spend with this unique collection of people, sharing stories and ideas. Everyone is at the BIF Summit for a reason and everyone has a purpose. But there’s also an incredible element of surprise over the course of those two days.
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We're excited to announce Cale Birk as this years first Community Scholarship recipient! We asked Cale why he's excited to attend BIF2016 and his response was nothing short of inspirational.
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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.
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BIF Summit storytellers featured in our healthcare and Patient Experience Lab work.
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We asked Shelley one question: What is it about the BIF Summit that excites you the most? Here's her answer:
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A selection of who to watch in and around education during the BIF Collaborative Innovation Summit.
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"I love the random collisions of unusual suspects, interweaved with the commonality of humanity. Where else would you have Richard Saul Wurman, Irwin Kula, Daniel Pink, and Camille Beatty? You'd never get that lineup at a regular conference."
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We asked Dara one question: What is it about the BIF Summit that excites you the most? Here's her answer:
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The distinct perspectives of the #BIF2015 Summit storytellers — poetry, mathematics, healthcare, online leaders — cannot help but jar loose our cherished assumptions, baked-in preconceptions, and limiting frames.
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We asked Doug one question: What is it about the BIF Summit that excites you the most? Here's his answer...
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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.
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Welcoming some of our Storytellers to our Collaborative Innovation Summit.
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While we have much work ahead of us — synthesizing scenarios, codifying methods, developing language and tone, and building the deliverable itself — we hope to continue to bring people into the process to co-create the narrative of the power of narrative in healthcare.
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It reaffirms my belief that storytelling is one of the most powerful tools for transformation…and the more context, depth, empathy, and honesty that the story has, the better chance we have at using those stories to inspire new relationships, design more relevant experience — and transform social systems.
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Those who know us well know that at BIF, we believe a great story can change the world. So we're happy to say that we have just kicked off an exciting new project with funding from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, all about the power of story in healthcare.
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The most successful businesses today are movements more than companies. Movements don’t market. Movements inspire and engage. They create an emotional connection through storytelling. Not stories to be enjoyed passively but stories we see ourselves in, stories we can actively participate in.
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Working in partnership with Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center we set about to understand the human factors that contribute to the inexplicably high rates of preterm births — babies born before 37 weeks of pregnancy and design solutions to reduce the trends.
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The storytellers will make your heart sing...and make you cry. You will make friends, you will develop new contacts, and you might even embark upon a journey that takes you places you never could have imagined. - Nicole Radziwi
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Many innovators face stiff organizational resistance when they try to offer a new way of doing things. It's a lonely battle trying to lead change and get others on board. At the BIF Summit, however, innovators find like-minded others. Everyone "gets it" and people support each other.
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You never know which BIF Summit story of passion, determination, and focus will transform and inspire you. It may a single story. It may be the curious intersection of many stories.
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The BIF Summit is like the college experience should have been — a lot of intellectually curious people connecting with each other. - Jon Follett.
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TIME.com series of interviews with BIF10 storytellers that explore their approaches to innovation and the importance of the BIF Collaborative Innovation Summit.
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We know this sounds like a pipe dream. And that's one of the reasons we created this "power of #RCUS" blog series — to share real #RCUS stories that make the idea more tangible.
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Go to the BIF Summit because of who you are going to accidentally, serendipitously sit next to, have coffee with, meet during breaks. Go to the BIF Summit because of the conversations that will be started as a result of the amazing storytellers you're going to see on stage.
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At the BIF Summit, you can leave your language at the door and just talk. - Lois Kelly
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To me, the BIF Summit is a humbler, more intimate version of TED. It's where you can talk to people doing amazing things and there's a sense of inclusion between the participants and the storytellers.
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"You'll never see things in the same way after you've been to the BIF Summit. " — Tim McDonald
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Simon Majumdar, traveler, bestselling author and Food Network Star has a perfect recipe for transformation. Get a taste for his innovation journey with this recent Q+A interview, before he whips up the main dish on the BIF-8 stage.
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One of the best conferences I’ve ever attended was BIF-6, held in Providence, RI and hosted by Saul Kaplan of the Business Innovation Factory.
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BIF-6 Recap. Optimism prevailed during this year's BIF-6 Summit. Innovators are a unique bunch. The glass is ALWAYS half full.
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This marks the official launch of BIF and TED's new content sharing partnership. TED has begun publishing select videos from BIF’s Innovation Story
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The BIF Summit, now in its sixth year, is the annual gathering of BIF’s national innovation community. The BIF Summit brings 30 storytellers together for a two-day conversation and now will feature TED.com
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Named alongside TED and Pop!Tech, the BIF Summit was noted both for the quality of the event and for BIF's effort to make video proceedings freely available via the web.
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Through a series of clear, straightforward, and thoughtful prompts, and several small group activities, the power of storytelling to persuade, cajole, and inspire was demonstrated.