The speakers at the 10th annual Business Innovation Factory Summit all have one thing in common: They want to shake things up.
The featured storytellers and audience members descended on the Trinity Repertory Company in downtown Providence Wednesday and Thursday, a congregation of “innovation junkies,” as the conference’s founder and chief catalyst Saul Kaplan called them. The event celebrates innovations in different fields of business through narratives, similar to a TED talk.
“Most of the people on stage talk all the time, so I ask them to tell a personal story,” Kaplan said. “It enables what I always call random collisions of unusual suspects — to help people collide outside of their normal discipline and industry sector.”
Innovation is truly sparked by the intersection of divergent experiences, Kaplan said. He founded the summit 10 years ago while he was working for the office of then-Rhode Island Gov. Donald Carcieri ’65 on the state’s economic development strategy.
“It was part of a broader strategy to make design, innovation and entrepreneurship central to the way we think of the future,” Kaplan said.
The speakers come from a wide variety of backgrounds. From a world-renowned interaction designer, to a 14-year-old robot builder, to a doctor who helped solve maternity deaths in Nepal, to a children’s book illustrator, speakers shared their personal stories with the hope of inspiring the audience to craft their own narratives of innovation.
“We spend a lot of time thinking about curating the event, and we’ve been at it for a while,” Kaplan said. “In the beginning, we were reaching out to people who we wanted to hear their stories, but now our network is so large and so strong that we get an amazing number of people who want to tell their stories coming to us.”
Keith Yamashita, the head of a strategy consulting firm in New York, was the first speaker at the summit — but he was not the last in encouraging the audience members to seek creative endeavors.
“We’re all born as creative beings,” Yamashita said. “All of us in here have survived school that tells you, ‘you’re not,’ a workforce that takes it out of you. … Creativity is a courageous daily practice.”
Rupal Patel, a speech scientist at Northeastern University, spoke about building individualized voice boxes for people with speech impairments.
“The prosthetic box isn’t just about the words they’re saying,” she said. “It’s not just about the words we say — it’s how we express them.”
Eileen Gittins, the CEO of a creative self-publishing platform called Blurb, described her personal history with technology, innovation and books.
“A book is the most awesomely crafted, created filter that history has ever known,” she said. “I don’t think that’s going away anytime soon.”
One speaker even centered his talk on an apology he made to the audience for inventing the online pop-up ad.
“First of all, let me say that I am very, very sorry,” said Ethan Zuckerman, before discussing his frustration with the current public climate surrounding the Internet.
For Debbie Mills-Scofield, a strategy consultant and visiting scholar at Brown, BIF10 was her fifth time attending the conference.
“I really enjoy the diversity and the depth that just doesn’t exist anywhere else,” she said. “BIF is a humble, intimate version of TED and that’s what I enjoy about it. I meet so many different people from all walks of life doing so many different things in one place that I couldn’t do otherwise.”
Every year, Mills-Scofield brings a group of Brown students to attend the summit with her.
“I want them to meet people who can impact their life,” she said. “I want to expose them to ideas and people and things going on that they wouldn’t easily get exposed to.”
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