The Business Innovation Factory (BIF) held its eighth annual collaborative innovation summit on Sept. 19 and 20 in Providence, and the key, as always, was the art of storytelling. No themes, said summit facilitator and BIF founder and “chief catalyst” Saul Kaplan. You decide which connections you ...]]> Click here for videos of BIF-8 storytellers!

The Business Innovation Factory (BIF) held its eighth annual collaborative innovation summit on Sept. 19 and 20 in Providence, and the key, as always, was the art of storytelling. No themes, said summit facilitator and BIF founder and “chief catalyst” Saul Kaplan. You decide which connections you can make, he told the 400-plus attendees.

Granted, going to a BIF summit is a bit like a visit to a shrink. Lots of platitudes about how good it is to fail, and chants like “Connect. Inspire. Transform.” A Swiss guy sitting next to me said, it’s kind of like a “church." And a little focus-groupish, I thought. Just below me, Dean Meyers was sketching the proceedings—a very BIFy touch. Still, the summits always feature enlightening storytellers. Among them:

MIT professor Sherry Turkle is the author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. She told of being asked during a recent panel discussion if someone should feel guilty about not wanting to talk to the checkout guy at Trader Joe’s. It seems the questioner saw the time checking out at the trendy grocery chain as her opportunity to catch up on any email she’d missed. But the Trader Joe’s clerk wanted to talk—what Turkle saw as good old-fashioned conversation, even customer service. Turkle broke with the other panelists—manners experts—by suggesting that the questioner go ahead and talk to the checkout guy, reminding her that CVS stores have already replaced checkout clerks with machines. Apple’s Siri takes it even further, she noted, teaching us how to have a conversation, even take advice, from a source that has never experienced a human feeling. Turkle warned that technology appeals to us most where we are most vulnerable—it offers the illusion of companionship without the burdens of friendship.

Darrel Hammond is the co-founder of the nonprofit KaBOOM. Hammond told of how he and his seven siblings became wards of the state when their father left and their mother could no longer care for them. A tough tale of foster care? Not completely. They were raised at a camp outside Chicago, where, among other things, there was a 1,200-acre lawn to run on and countless trees to climb. Now, in an era when just one in five kids lives within walking distance of a public park or playground, and school recess is being cut back, Hammond has become a crusader for play. Play, he noted, is the foundation for learning, as kids work out differences with others who don’t look or speak like them … and it’s fun. Many of us put kids in organized sports, he said, but where’s the creativity when there’s an adult with a whistle? His KaBOOM initiative gathers volunteers to build playgrounds in a single day focusing primarily on so-called “play deserts.”

The health care field has been particularly immune to innovation in service, aside from ever-fancier medical procedures, according to Nancy M. Schlichting, CEO of Henry Ford Health Systems in Detroit. A lot of administrative people are not sensitive to the patient, she said. She called on organizations to look for “disruptive” people, like the surgeon who suggested placing kiosks focused on health and wellness at churches, or the chair of urology who came to her with the idea to adapt robotic technology for prostate cancer patients, or the nurse who draws inspirational sayings on disposable gowns that the staff wears, knowing the gown will be thrown away when the work is done. She cited Gerard van Grinsven, a former Ritz-Carlton manager, who now leads the chain’s West Bloomfield Hospital, which includes not only the latest medical equipment and practices, but also luxury hotel amenities, excellent cuisine, a day spa and an indoor farmer’s market. Recognizing that hospitals can’t pick up and leave the communities where they are anchors, Henry Ford Health has embarked on community partnerships such as providing incentives for employees to live in Detroit.

Mike Harsh said when he was a kid, he’d build things in his basement out of junk parts his Navy father would bring home. He didn’t know the math behind any of it, but the things he made, worked. He went to college for material sciences, but wanted to get back to electronics. He was faced with a career choice: design missiles for one of the growing aerospace firms or go to GE Healthcare. He chose the latter for what he thought would be a short experiment, but he has stayed there 33 years, designing nuclear cameras and developing CT scans. Innovation happens at the intersection of disciplines, he said, and some people will always say, “That’ll never work.” People thought ultrasounds would not work. Harsh showed the BIF crowd the progress from early ultrasounds that looked like blurry windshields, to ultramodern instruments using carbon 13 showing light to trace tissue abnormalities.

Robin Chase, founder of Zipcar, explained how the car-sharing company helps the environment because people often sell their own cars, and then drive less in the rentals where they pay by the hour. She has also spoke of introducing buzzcar in France, in which individuals rent their own cars to their neighbors. An upside is that the owner of the car and the borrower might get tips on restaurants, find baby seats installed—all human niceties you won’t find with a car-rental business like Enterprise. It’s peer-to-peer—a big BIF theme. We can solve world’s problems with such open-innovation platforms for participation, Chase said. As examples, she cited carpooling.com of Germany, which moves a million people a month; fiverr offering small services for $5 and up; Topcoder advancing digital open innovation; and Etsy, the marketplace for things people make themselves.

Jeffrey Sparr said his Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) was so bad he’d have the feeling of turning around in a busy airport to find his two-year-old child missing. But he’d have that anxiety all the time. Plus compulsions. During a particularly desperate episode, Sparr tried painting and, lo and behold, he noticed he felt better. He painted obsessively, he said, like the way Forest Gump started running. Pieces included ½ of Daddy, depicting himself only half there for his children, and PeaceLove, which he hopes will do for mental illness what the LiveStrong bracelet has done for cancer. PeaceLove Studios was established by Sparr and a partner to build the first positive symbol for mental illness. One in four people suffer from some kind of mental illness, he noted, and two of three don’t get the help they need due to stigma. Sparr also coined the term “Wear Share Experience” to create a platform so people could share their stories of mental illness in a celebratory way.

Hillary Salmons spoke of creating a learning world for middle-schoolers through the Providence After School Alliance, which she directs. Besides being the lustiest years for young people, middle-school time is the most robust in terms of asking questions. With brain development in full throttle, these are years we should be tapping, instead of wasting. Moreover, Providence has the third highest child poverty rate in the U.S. One solution has been “AfterZones: a mix of creative, intellectual and physical events with community partners built on a coordinated schedules for the whole city of Providence The police chief got cops to come in for sports. In the third year, teachers started to want to be involved. One offered to teach horseback riding. There was no obvious place to ride, so the police chief offered the police stables. Salmons said the program formed partnerships between informal afterschool educators and formal educators, using inquiry-based STEM learning with groups such as the Audubon Society of Rhode Island. All boats started to rise.

Science photographer Felice Frankel, a research scientist at MIT’s Center for Materials Science and Engineering, touted visualization. She spoke about No Small Matter, a book she co-authored with scientist George Whitesides on nanotechnology. The book refers to an information processor connected by wires that are only 1,000 atoms wide. Frankel shared a print she did on acetate using a flatbed scanner to show a nanotube cylinder with details showing electron clouds. Creating the representation made me learn about it, she noted, adding that visualizing reveals misconceptions. We should start drawing collaboratively, she said, and bring this strategy to schools. I don’t draw personally, she added, but I see the power of it. She also championed using photos as metaphors, citing as an example a photo of empty seats at a graduation ceremony to represent the difficult-to-represent notion of cell assembly.

Jeff Lieberman mesmerized the BIF audience with a time-lapsed photo of a drop of water as he described his work as host of Discovery Channel’s Time Warp. The only thing an infant pays attention to is what’s right in front of them, he told the BIF audience. Yet adults standing in line are uncomfortable because they’re thinking of where they’d rather be. People are living longer, but with more stress, he said. He cited a Harvard study showing that about half the time people’s minds are not on what they’re doing. He observed how different that is from being an infant, when no alternatives exist to distract the mind, or from being in deep sleep before waking up and beginning “self-created suffering” as the mind gets hung up on categorizing and theorizing the world around it.

Carol Coletta, president of CEOs for Cities, noted that three things attract people to communities: social offerings, openness and aesthetics. She cited a New York Times article arguing that even the Champs-Élysées feels like nowhere because it feels like everywhere. Even bike-sharing and local food movements have moved from fringe movements by citizens to mass consciousness. The global elite used to sit on the boards of local museums and other charities. But now they own second and third homes and effortlessly move between them. When you divide yourself between multiple houses, she wondered, what do you call home?

Carne Ross told of his journey from British diplomat to something of an “anarchist.” While working at the UN for the United Kingdom, he called the Iraq War illegal, putting his future employment in question. In 2004, he founded Independent Diplomat, to help fledgling states such as Kosovo operate in international halls of power. Today, the world is not a chessboard, Ross said. It’s more like a Jackson Pollock painting. No government can track that and know what’s going on. What might work instead, he suggested, is agent-led change. He pointed to the “Porto Alegre experiment” in Brazil showing, as he wrote in The Nation, that “mass participation in decision-making has succeeded in deliberating the affairs of a city, and the results clearly indicate more equal provision of services, better environmental protection and an improved political culture, one that is open, nonpartisan and uncorrupted.”

Andrew Hessel is a “genomic futurist.” In 1990, scientists had analyzed one genome of a virus. By 2000, they had completed the genome of bacteria and humans. Now, genomic synthesizing technology has unlocked genetic engineering, allowing us all to be genetic engineers. In 2004, MIT started to teach undergrads (whom Hessel analogized to undifferentiated stem cells) how to use genomic synthesizing. The living cell is far more complex than an electronic computer, and the cell self-manufactures. Programming it will control food supplies, create new drugs and build renewable fuels.

Jeremy Heimans runs Purpose, a home for movement-building. Recently, Purpose incubated the global gay rights movement. He showed the BIF audience a photo of a homemade sign, reading: “’I’m very much in love with you’ Free Roger” to protest the arrest of a man in Cameroon for sending a note proclaiming his love for another man. As a child, Heimans captured attention trying to counter the Cold War. After finding the UN and nonprofit sector too inefficient, and McKinsey & Co., efficient but not aligned with his politics, he moved on to Oxford, where he again became antsy. Drawn to action, he campaigned against the first Gulf War using faxes and the second one using the Internet.

Teny Gross, the Israeli-born director of the Institute of the Study & Practice of Nonviolence in Providence, told of working to end street violence in Boston during the Hub’s cracked 1990s, when the number of murders passed 150 one year (compared to about 30 a year now). Today, his streetworkers include former leaders of the Latin Kings and other gangs who teach young people to stay out of trouble. We need to recycle them into the economy as was done in Belfast, he said, adding that the leader of peace in Israel today is a former soldier. People who were written off are now productive.

Consultant Susan Schuman said she loves helping companies transform. (Starbucks, IBM, etc.) But how do you drive transformation at scale. Her “Unstuck” app helps individuals bring their best selves to work. She has expanded the model to focus on teams via Teamworks. Organizations have become good at managing the top and the bottom of their workforce but not the “forgotten middle.” Schuman said her first job was on the “Newton” project at Apple, which failed. No one was teaching her, she said. She took the experience and created a company to deal with people in the middle. We think of business as rational. But it’s not only rational. It’s also human and personal. People come to work when they’re sick, cranky, etc. We have to bring the human element into work.

In offering his M.O., Dave Gray said: You are always in the middle of something. You have to put it out there. He cited Google and Amazon as successful examples of innovators that are always starting in the middle. When Gray’s company was acquired by DachisGroup, he was concerned because he knew that 70% of change initiatives fail. Besides DachisGroup was a “social business”; Gray wasn’t sure what that meant. At BIF, he used illustrations from Are You My Mother to show him asking “What is a social business?” He started a blog, and became known as a “getting things done” blogger. People kept asking, “Do you have a book?” (Which gave Gray the opportunity to tell a joke at BIF about two professors meeting after not seeing each other for many years. One asks the other, what have you been up to? The second one says I’m writing a book. To which, the first one answers: “Neither am I.”)

Lara Lee, chief innovation and operating officer at Continuum, described the difficult challenge of helping Pampers enter China. Many people in China live in extended families and use cloth diapers and split pants, so didn’t need disposable diapers. Lee's firm helped position Pampers as allowing more sleep for parents.

Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos and author of Delivering Happiness, told of looked at new campuses in the Fremont East section of Las Vegas—a very community-focused neighborhood many people wouldn't think of being in Vegas. Zappos added ROC (return on community) to its mission. Among other things, Hsieh is partnering with venture for America—like Teach for America, but for entrepreneurs—and offering free hotel rooms, which have led to serendipitous connections and collisions.

And then there were the obligatory precocious teenagers. Last year, 14-year-old mountain climber Matthew Moniz spoke of climbing the highest peaks on seven continents and all 50 U.S. states in honor of his best friend who has Primary Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension. This year, the public-spirited teens included Nicholas Lowinger, a 14-year-old who started the Gotta Have Sole Foundation to give shoes to homeless kids and Rachel Shuster, the 16-year-old founder of Kids Care HHH, which offers club models for public service.

To be sure, the young people are a bit confident for their age, but at BIF, they are more than just an affectation; they are the future of innovation.

(Cross-published on JOH NEJHE blog by John O. Harney.)

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Tell Me Another One: More Stories from the Business Innovation Factory

Tell Me a Story: Reporting from the BIF-6 Conference in Providence

Painting of "The Midway and the Men Who Stole Dolph's Dog" by Montserrat College professor Timothy Harney.

That was the dangerous question raised by Stanford University behavioral scientist Byron Reeves at the BIF-7 conference in downtown Providence on Sept. 20 and 21.

Reeves had met J. Leighton Read at a soccer game in Silicon Valley, and they began ...]]> What would it be like if work and play were more alike?

That was the dangerous question raised by Stanford University behavioral scientist Byron Reeves at the BIF-7 conference in downtown Providence on Sept. 20 and 21.

Reeves had met J. Leighton Read at a soccer game in Silicon Valley, and they began talking about work. Their conversation led to ways to marry the primitive engagement of interactive games with the dull technology of most computerized evaluation and productivity tools. Ultimately, they coauthored a book: Total Engagement: How Games and Virtual Worlds Are Changing the Way People Work and Businesses Compete.

If you worked in a call center, said Reeves, your work would be energized if you could participate in an epic narrative in which you could measure in real time how well you were answering customers' questions in a sort of competition with others. The more context, the better, Reeves said. He cited experiments in which players in first-person shooter games performed better when they had fuller stories.

IBM has meetings with clients where employees use avatars and dress them as outlandishly as they wish, but in the process, they are doing work. Reeves noted that guild leaders from the game World of Warcraft could play key roles in this world of work. He added that security officials could outline a potential terrorist in the London subway by using visualization technologies similar to those that TV broadcasters and advertisers use to diagram humans with meshy gridlines.

The problem with the concept, Reeves quipped, is that work might become so engaging, we'd see more repetitive-strain injuries.

Gathering dreamers

If the name Business Innovative Factory conjures the image of a belching manufacturing plant or a sterile corporate consulting firm, it's neither. It's really a band of dreamers. Reeves is one of them. He was one of 30 entrepreneurs and artists tell stories who gathered to tell 15-minute stories about ways they use innovation and social technologies to help solve problems. Storytelling has become the ritual for BIF and its band of followers.

Lest there be any doubt about the creativity in the room at BIF-7, check out this method of doodling/notetaking by entrepreneur and education reform advocate Angus Davis. Or the "mind-maps" by designer Amanda Fenton.

At the BIF conference, bestselling author Dan Pink said innovators are in the business of giving people something they didn’t know they were missing (in contrast to the "give the people what they want" mantra spouted famously by the Kinks and imitated by scores of marketers). To me, said Pink, giving people what they didn’t know they were missing is what painters and sculptors do. Or physicists like Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, who won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on the material called graphene that is one-atom thick but stronger than steel.

Pink then told of  Teresa Amabile, who pulled together commissioned and non-commissioned art work and asked art experts to rate the pieces. Both types of work were judged well-executed, but the non-commissioned work was seen as more creative. Yet in most workplaces, Pink noted, everything is commissioned. In response, some workplaces are adopting “Fedex” day or “hack” week when workers can do whatever they like on company time. Companies are not signing away licenses on these innovations. Indeed, Pink said it is during these non-commissioned hours that Google employees developed gmail.

Fourteen-year-old mountain climber Matthew Moniz of Boulder, Colo., told of setting a goal to climb to the highest peaks on seven continents and a record speed ascent of the high points in all 50 U.S. states. He told of devoting his climbing to his best friend who has Primary Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension. Moniz noted that when climbing Cerro Aconcagua in South America, he realized that the effects of a low-oxygen, high-altitude environment mimicked the symptoms his best friend struggled with on a daily basis. Moniz then conceived of of the "14 Fourteeners in 14 Days" to climb 14 of Colorado's 14,000-foot peaks in 14 days to raise funds and awareness of the disorder.

Big Picture Learning founder Dennis Littky began with his usual bluntness. "High schools suck, colleges suck," he said. "And who loses? the kids, and who loses the most? The disenfranchised kids." Littky said he asked Moniz how he managed to spend so much time out of school doing the climbing and fundraising. Turns out only his Spanish teacher marked him down, because he spent a month in South America!

Littky introduced Elicia, a student from the Met Center that Littky founded in Rhode Island in 1995. She talked of her experience, first looking at pediatrics and marine science, "but I love hair," she said waving a hand through her mane. Michelangelo said in every every piece of granite he saw what it was going to be when worked on, and I saw this in Elicia, said Littky. "Elicia changed so much when she went to Africa and India," he added, referring to her opportunities to travel abroad.

Elicia's story gave Littky a segue to tell of his own life. He taught in New York City, then went off the grid in New Hampshire (before people used that expression), became a state legislator, joined the PTA, and then went to Brown, where he worked with education pioneer Ted Sizer. Littky was invited to start a school, and he said only if I can do it how I want. He did, and in the end, 100% of graduates went on to college, and there was a 2% dropout rate compared with 46% citywide. Bill Gates came back with millions of dollars to build more schools just like ours, said Littky.

Then Littky got mad about college. Nearly nine of 10 first-generation college students drop out. Littky started College Unbound, using the same model as Big Picture Learning: Let students find their passions and pursue what they’re interested in. Elicia is now in the first graduating class from College Unbound. Littky noted that Big Picture is interested in integrating learning into the lives of America's 30 million adult learners, such as having ex-cons study recidivism.

Mari  Kuraishi began her story by recalling what she had observed as a student visiting the Berlin Wall. The people on the Eastern side ignored her and her rowdy friends standing on observation towers on the Western side. She went on to study Russian in college. When in 1991, the Soviet Union fell apart, Kuraishi figured her Russian would be useless. She got hired by the World Bank (though she knew nothing about international development) and became country officer working on Russian. There, she got a tiny piece of the World Bank budget for using innovation. In a form of crowdsourcing, the bank started inviting people to meet in the auditorium with ideas to rid the world of poverty, but the bank's attention to the issue was obviously low. So Kuraishi left and founded GlobalGiving. She knew nothing about philanthropy (as she had known nothing about international development), but, among other things, she wanted to figure out how a social system could create behavior that was so counter to biological drive as she had seen among the Germans on the Eastern side of  the Berlin Wall. She cited eudaimonia, which she described as the deliberate practice for integration of new options that make sense to you over time.

Chris Mayer began by noting that “capitalism evolves.” Mayer’s figures showed how competition led to antitrust laws and labor exploitation led to labor laws. But the next changes, he said, will come in China and India, where the new species of entrepreneurs are being developed. Mayer told of GE started making a $500 EKG machine that can be used in places like India over dusty roads, but with the same operating system as $5,000 equipment used in the west.

Mallika Chopra and Gotham Chopra told of growing up with father Depak Chopra talking about mind and body, so seen as an East Asian doctor selling snake oil. They wondered why celebrities like Lady Gaga were so impressed with the modest guy they just thought of as father. Mallika founded Intent.com, a website to connect people from around the world to improve their own lives, their communities and the planet. Mallika and Gotham also created Liquid Comics, designed to showcase Indian artists. In early 2001, long before terrorism fears swept the U.S., Gotham did a story for Channel One about madrassas in Pakistan, where a child told him, we don’t have superheroes here … look around. Gotham wondered what a world would be like without superheroes.

Jim Mellado, president of The Willow Creek Association, helped local churches maximize their capacity to change lives. Mellado told of getting Bono to come to the biggest church in the world in South Korea. At the beginning, the priest worried whether Bono was a man of faith. But after Bono spoke, the priest wondered: Am I man of faith?

Angela Blanchard, CEO of Houston-based Neighborhood Centers Inc., explained why here approach to community development contrasts with the old way of studying everything that's broken in poor neighborhoods. After Katrina, 125,000 people from New Orleans arrived in Houston with one or two items of clothing each. Blanchard said her organization had to change the way we asked questions. They began asking the evacuees about their strengths and relationships, rather than what they'd lost. Blanchard says the evacuees immediately straightened up with new hope.

Alexander Osterwalder described his book, Business Model Generation, and the stiff challenges of marketing a business book. Initially, the idea was rejected by big publishing houses because the authors were relative no-names. Osterwalder decided to self-publish, and hired a designer to developed a very visual book with white space and ways to engage readers. Osterwalder and his partners  charged a fee for participation in the book and raised it several times. The value, he said, was to be part of something bigger. The co-created work of 470 people around the world, eventually attracted one of those big publishers, Wiley. Osterwalder described his philosophy: He's likes to break the rules and make stuff. And he would be very proud if his kids learned to break the right rules.

Among other storytellers ...

Alex Jadad, founder of the Centre for Global Ehealth Innovation in Toronto, noted that so much effort and funding goes into adding years to our lives, he but it's time to put more life into our years. After years of of trying to find cures for diseases, he has come around to the importance of helping improve healing and wellness—of consoling sick people.

Yahoo social scientist Duncan Watts noted that he the hates the term: It’s not rocket science. Because actually we’re better at rocket science than using social sciences to solve problems. The reason is that history never really repeats itself.

Sebastian Ruth of Community Music Works began by playing an Armenian mournful song and asked how the music made people feel. Music is one way to open doors to world of possibility, he said. He echoed Brown University President Ruth Simmons said assertion that it doesn’t matter what kind of environment you’re from, you should have access to the world of ideas.

Dale J. Stephens described UnCollege, a social movement he founded at age 19 that applies the self-directed brand of homeschooling with which he was raised to the realm of higher education. Complaining that colleges too often teach conformity, Stephens noted: "We're paying too much for college and learning too little." He received a $100,000 fellowship, sponsored by Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal and the first investor in Facebook, for promising young people who forgo a traditional college education to work on innovative projects.

Fred Mandell, a sculptor and painter, said he had a creative mantra: create, integrate, make a difference. He read books, letter about great artists to see what made them creative. Yet some didn't make it in art. Certain core skills beyond pure talent that allow them to sustain creative output over time.

Andy van Dam, who received the second computer science degree ever granted described the challenge of looking at large-scale art pieces such as Garibaldi panorama scrolls, including technology allowing viewers to click on a small part of the work and get more detailed descriptions of that part of the scroll.

Andrew Losowsky, books editor with The Huffington Post, noted that breaking the bounds of "likely space" brings more dopamine. As he explained, the first time he saw a cellphone with a GPS, he was blown away. The second time, he was impressed. The fourth time he doesn't remember. Everything is a story when you reshape the space and the likely space.

Jon Cropper, cofounder of FuturLogic, a for-profit online entrepreneurship institute, explained his theory of marketing developed during a career spanning posts with Nissan North America to the companies of Sean "Diddy" Combs. Cropper noted that if you're selling something, aim to out-teach, not to out-sell. Also aim for simplexity: a simple exterior with understated quality. Cropper showed that Playboy magazine was simple and elegant in design when it began.

Whitney Johnson described "disruptive innovation" in which low-end innovation upends an industry (like Netflix currently doing and proponents of distance learning contend it will do). Companies disrupt companies, said Johnson, but people can also disrupt their careers and their lives. Johnson was a music major, who went to New York City as a secretary, then analyst and ended up cofounding a hedge fund with disruptive innovation guru Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School.

Valdis Krebs showed the BIF genome he developed based on a survey of attendees' interests and urged them to connect on similarities and benefit from differences—even after the BIF-7 mutation.

For a fuller look at BIF-7, visit http://businessinnovationfactory.com/bif-7.