Every September, I get a new fix of inspiration at the Business Innovation Factory (BIF) summit of innovators. Last week, I was at BIF’s 12th summit, my sixth. My main inspiration this year came from Dave Gray. The founder of the strategic design consultancy XPLANE, co-founder of Boardthing and author of Liminal Thinking gave a simple message: Shut off autopilot. As he said, the only place we...
Last week, I was at Providence’s Trinity Rep covering BIF2015, the Business Innovation Factory's summit of innovators.
It was BIF’s 11th summit, my fifth as a guest. I was attending under a quasi-media category called RCUS, standing for the BIF mantra of “Random Collisions of Unusual Suspects.”
BIF founder and "chief catalyst" Saul Kaplan opened the talks by noting that earlier in th...
I was at Providence’s Trinity Rep last week covering the Business Innovation Factory's (BIF's) summit of innovators—BIF’s ninth, my fourth. The lineup of speakers—“storytellers” in BIF parlance—included puppeteers, rebels at work, an innovative rabbi, educators and assorted other visionaries. The audience: about 400 self-assessed innovators, some with job titles like Chief Sorceres...
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...
Why students should play a designer role in the creation of new (and better!) school experiences.
Choosing a school is only the first step in planning an academic career. After making a selection, students must match interests and passions with an academic program and make important decisions about which courses to take and when to take them. Yet many students struggle with these choices and ha...
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 inte...
A few hundred people packed the Trinity Rep theater in downtown Providence Wednesday, Sept. 15, and Thursday, Sept. 16, with ears and minds open. More than a dozen entrepreneurs and artists told stories of how they used innovation and social technologies to help solve problems from protecting mothers in childbirth to cleaning up unwanted graffiti to turning grease into fuel.
Much of the Busine...
Every September, I get a new fix of inspiration at the Business Innovation Factory (BIF) summit of innovators. Last week, I was at BIF’s 12th summit, my sixth. My main inspiration this year came from Dave Gray. The founder of the strategic design consultancy XPLANE, co-founder of Boardthing and author of Liminal Thinking gave a simple message: Shut off autopilot. As he said, the only place we... 
Last week, I was at Providence’s Trinity Rep covering BIF2015, the Business Innovation Factory's summit of innovators.
It was BIF’s 11th summit, my fifth as a guest. I was attending under a quasi-media category called RCUS, standing for the BIF mantra of “Random Collisions of Unusual Suspects.”
BIF founder and "chief catalyst" Saul Kaplan opened the talks by noting that earlier in th... 
I was at Providence’s Trinity Rep last week covering the Business Innovation Factory's (BIF's) summit of innovators—BIF’s ninth, my fourth. The lineup of speakers—“storytellers” in BIF parlance—included puppeteers, rebels at work, an innovative rabbi, educators and assorted other visionaries. The audience: about 400 self-assessed innovators, some with job titles like Chief Sorceres... 
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... 
Why students should play a designer role in the creation of new (and better!) school experiences.
Choosing a school is only the first step in planning an academic career. After making a selection, students must match interests and passions with an academic program and make important decisions about which courses to take and when to take them. Yet many students struggle with these choices and ha... 
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 inte... 
A few hundred people packed the Trinity Rep theater in downtown Providence Wednesday, Sept. 15, and Thursday, Sept. 16, with ears and minds open. More than a dozen entrepreneurs and artists told stories of how they used innovation and social technologies to help solve problems from protecting mothers in childbirth to cleaning up unwanted graffiti to turning grease into fuel.
Much of the Busine...