I’m in Providence, Rhode Island today speaking at BIF-5 – the Business Innovation Factory’s fifth annual storytelling conference. I’ll be doing my best to blog when not on stage.

Melissa Withers, the executive director of Business Innovation Factory, starts her talk thanking three men – our host Saul Kaplan; her husband; and our first speaker, Michael Samuelson. Her husband heard Samuelson’s talk about breast cancer and gave himself a testicular exam. It helped him find testicular cancer, which he sought treatment for and is now four years cancer-free.

Her talk is not on cancer, but on the future of college education. She shows us photos of five people desperately seeking a college education. She tells us that these students are facing barriers that are painful, sometimes funny, and incredibly important. Our country is falling behind in post-secondary education, she tells us.

The problem is that “the system (mostly) sucks”, that “the student experience (really) sucks” and that the student voice is almost invisible in the experience.

With support from the Lumina Foundation, she and BIF have been focused on looking for ways to put students and student voice at the center of the experience of finding a college. They’ve been surveying students at 40 schools across the country, trying to figure out why 50% of college students drop out, 33% in the first year. She uses the term “stopping out”, because she’s worried the other term suggests that students don’t care.

Her preliminary conclusions:
- Students are making bad decisions
- They’re maxed out on debt
- Schools are daisy-chained in a bad system, but are struggling to deal with it

Students make bad decisions in part because they’ve got very little support. There’s roughly eight hundred students for every college admission counselors. Only 23% of students have the math, reading, science skills to fully embrace higher education. They’re playing catch up, which is never fun.

The financial consequences are serious. 28% of college graduates delay having kids due to student loans, and more delay buying a house. She believes that lots aren’t getting much for their investment. Only 39% of college graduates felt they were doing more critical thinking after their four year college experience.

To conclude:
- Not enough get in
- Even fewer get out
- Those that do are broke and unsatisfied

We need to rethink the whole four year college experience – this isn’t working, and it may be setting us further back as a society.

I’m in Providence, Rhode Island today speaking at BIF-5 – the Business Innovation Factory’s fifth annual storytelling conference. I’ll be doing my best to blog when not on stage.

Roger Martin of the Rotman School of Management is pretty disturbed by the current state of business education. He quotes the Economist, in which a writer recently accused business education of producing “jargon spewing economic vandals”. This, he says, is true. But he and others are working on new models for education. “And that’s all because the students don’t want to be jargon spewing economic vandals.”

Business leaders deserve an education that’s broad, deep and dynamic. They tend to get an education that’s shallow, narrow and static. The biggest problem is that the education is disconnected from the real world. He offers the examples of the Nobel-winning Black-Shoales option pricing equation. It’s designed to price the short term call option for a specific type of European stock. It’s now being used – badly – for a completely different set of problems. That’s our fault – we’re not doing a good job of connecting education to real-world conditions. Too often, we offer students a set of existing tools, and we spend less than 5% of our time encouraging the development of new solutions.

“It’s much easier to teach finance if you assume that people are rational, profit-maximizing economic actors – it makes the math much easier.” But it doesn’t work this way – people have emotions, they’re not profit-maximizing. You need to get fuzzier and less declarative about what people ought to be.

In this new model of business education, the capstone course for the first year is on model building, with a strong emphasis on the limits and limitations of models. The goal is to create students who can ask their professors “when do these models break down?” The desire to build models that are more complex and more fuzzy means that it’s possible to bring in environmental factors and other real-world factors. This can lead towards an education that’s dynamic, not static, one that goes beyond teaching students to choose amongst options.

Students love this method, he tells us, and corporations are thrilled to hire these students. The opportunity is tremendous. 22% of all American undergrads and 28% of American grad students are engaged in business education. If we could get this right, we’d have a transformative force for the future of innovation.

I’m in Providence, Rhode Island today speaking at BIF-5 – the Business Innovation Factory’s fifth annual storytelling conference. I’ll be doing my best to blog when not on stage.

Neri Oxman tells us a story about an art critic visiting Jackson Pollock. Seeing no models or photos in his studio, he asked, “Do you work from nature?” Pollock replied, “I am nature.”

Oxman tells us that she’s interested in process, not product, method, not merchandise, systems, not segments. This means moving from the idea of artist as a God, creating immaculately from the vision in the mind, to an approach based on form-finding, not form-making. This is about “letting material tell its own stories.”

Her working method involves looking at natural specimens, bringing them into digital domains and then back into the physical with design outputs. We tend to produce objects by modeling, analyzing and then fabricating. But nature combines these projects together. “I move to space, I lose 15% of bone mass in two weeks – I get pregnant and gain it back. Nature produces bone using these three processes at once.”

She shows a textile she developed via a process that allows a designer to pick certain solutions from an evolutionary algorithm, rather than explicitly designing solutions. A similar project led her to build a structural skin using a stiff black material and a soft, white, light-transmitting material – the structural material is able to adapt thicknesses to the load, creating highly custom solutions to problems. This material was used to create a Chaise lounge which was designed around the pressure map of a user’s body against a surface. The chair was generated via 3D printing and mixes softness and stiffness in a way that’s customized for a particular user.

Oxman suffers from carpal tunnel syndrome, and complains about the non-customizability of the splints that are available to the general public. Working with materials scientist Craig Carter at MIT, she drew “pain maps” of her hands and was able to design custom splints that provide great stability and flexibility.” The key is to design from the materials and the form of the user, not from the artist’s pristine vision.

I’m in Providence, Rhode Island today speaking at BIF-5 – the Business Innovation Factory’s fifth annual storytelling conference. I’ll be doing my best to blog when not on stage.

Bruce Nussbaum from the Parsons School (and formerly of Businessweek) interviews Nestle’s VP of innovation, Helmut Traitler. Traitler was charged with creating $5 billion in incremental revenue, an incredible task even for a big corporation. He’s helped create a new Nestle by embracing open innovation.

He warns us that “open innovation” is a buzzword – “when people don’t know what they’re talking about, they coin buzzwords.” But there’s real value towards opening the innovation process. Too often, someone within Nestle identifies a new market opportunity and then asks product developers to solve technical problems. But this sort of innovation tends to take a long time – too long to seize market opportunities. By opening up the innovation process, companies like Nestle can seize opportunities more quickly.

To explain how open innovation works, he outlines a problem that Nestle has been facing – how to produce ice cream without keeping it cold and solid throughout the lifecycle of the product. The need to keep ice cream cold means it’s very expensive to distributed. “Can we make a foam that feels like ice cream but can ship warm,” and be cooled before selling? This is precisely the sort of question we’d want to solve via open innovation… but if we frame the problem, we’re likely to tip our hand on our business strategy. So we innovate by giving out problems like this in a disguised way, obscured so that they’re generic.

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Nell Merlino, the CEO of Count Me In, founded the national Bring Your Daughter to Work movement. She tells us about one of the earliest events they held, in New York City, with the strong cooperation of Mayor Dinkins. The mayor sent a note to 250,000 city employees encouraging them to bring daughters to work, and he held a public event, introducing city government officials to meet a group of seventh grade girls.

The event had heavy press coverage, and the press was scribbling frantically as Bella Abzug, legendarily fierce women’s rights advocate, took the stage to address the girls. She told them about being one of the first of two women in her law school class and about trying a case in court while 8 months pregnant. The first question from the audience: “Did your husband laugh at you when you decided to run for Congress?”

Abzug leaned in close to the girl and said, “One thing we have to talk about today, girls, is how to find the right kind of fella.” Her husband had just died, and she spoke movingly about their partnership… moving a group of cynical journalists to tears. Nell explains that she and Abzug both aren’t anti-men, just pro-girls.

She tells about a daughters to work event at a fairly conservative corporation where the women all wore “pussycat bows”. The event was a little awkward, as one of the girls observed, “Your jobs seem really boring.” She followed up, asking the most powerful woman in the company, “Wasn’t there something else you’d wanted to do when you grew up. The woman responded, “Well, I always wanted to be a nightclub singer.” The girl asked her for a song, and she belted out “The Way We Were.” The story taught Nell “what women were surpressing to fit in in the workplace,” and wondered “what kind of work environments can women create?”

There are now more women employed than men in the US – it wasn’t a healthy path to get there, as the equalization has happened as lots of men lost jobs in the most recent recession. The question of how women will create work environments is a critical one.

Women’s businesses tend to be very small – the vast majority have less than $50,000 in gross revenue. “That’s not a business – you should go get a job.” She’s running a campaign called “Make mine a million”, designed to help women break through barriers and build big, important businesses.

One of those growing businesses focuses on the niche of recruiting African Americans for drug trials. There’s a long history of African American resistance for volunteering for drug trials – Tuskeegee isn’t that far in the past. But a women-run, African-American run company has found a way to do so, employing 150 people and growing quickly. Another business, “Eat My Words” in San Francisco – is a naming firm. She tells us that the office features a pink refrigerator filled with books. They’re enroute to a million in revenue per year.

It’s not always easy. Women, she tells us, are bad at hiring, and “we don’t like looking at the numbers because they tend to defeat the dream.” We need to get over these barriers and build businesses that transform the economy as a whole and for women.

I’m in Providence, Rhode Island today speaking at BIF-5 – the Business Innovation Factory’s fifth annual storytelling conference. I’ll be doing my best to blog when not on stage.

Don Tapscott tells us that the children of the baby boom are the first to be bathed in bits. Their time online hasn’t taken away from doing their homework or learning the piano – it’s taken time away from television. “There is no more powerful force to change society than a generation of digital natives.” Digital Natives just elected their first president – this isn’t Don’s point of view – Obama says this is true as well.

He tells us that he watched his kids in the early 1990s and marvelled at their effortlessness with new technology. He initially thought that his kids were prodigies, and then discovered that all their friends were equally fluent. They were effortless because they’d grown up digital.

His kids weren’t very sympathetic to his attempts to explain new technology to a public audience in Canada. He was invited to spend an hour on national TV, surfing the web. His son refused to watch the show – when they talked about it later, his son said, “That’s about as interesting as watching you change channels on the TV.” His daughter pitched in, pointing out that the refrigerator is also a technology – “We could watch Dad surfing the fridge – here’s some content: it’s meatloaf!”

Some years later, Tapscott published a book called “Wikinomics”. His son read the book and liked it, and offered to build a Facebook group for his father. Within a day, the community had 130 members in 7 countries, and had a set of organizational officers. Before they sat down to Christmas dinner, the members were engaged in distributed editing, and were asking Don how he was going to contribute to “their” community. Kids have a platform no one has ever had before – it’s never been possible to organize the world in quite this way.

He closes with a story about a remarkable student he met when advising Florida State University. He told university officials that the old model of students as empty vessels, and universities as pouring in knowledge was broken for the current generation.

A student, Joe O’Shea, reacted to this presentation, saying that it resonated, and confessing, “I don’t read books.” He explained, “I think I know what’s in books, but I get my information from the web, and I’ve got really good BS detectors. If I need to read in a book, I have Google Books.” Using that site, he approaches books like a website. The dean of the film school reacted, saying, “I don’t know if that’s really exciting or the end of modern society.”

Tapscott offered O’Shea a ride home on his chartered plane and the two chatted. Turns out that O’Shea runs a 4.0 GPA, is president of the student council, set up a medical clinic in the 9th ward of New Orleans that serves 9000 people a year, and is founding a group called the Global Peace Exchange, which is building a global summit of world leaders. His family has been going through tough times – both parents died recently – and to keep his siblings together, Joe is running a guild on World of Warcraft, so he and his siblings can bond while slaying dragons. Next year, he’s going to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. “This Rhodes scholar from Northeast Florida doesn’t read books.”

We might conclude this is a problem, or we might embrace this. “If you spend 24 hours a week being a passive participant, consuming tv – as Baby Boomers did – you get a certain sort of brain.” If you spend those hours searching, researching and building connections, you get a very different brain.

Tapscott wants to refute the idea that the internet is making kids dumb. There’s no data to support this, he tells us. Instead, we’re seeing radical societal change, especially around the structure of the family. Kids and parents get along as friends, and sometimes they move back in after graduation. He wonders, “is this the first time in history that we can learn from young people and their new culture of work and learning?”

I’m in Providence, Rhode Island today speaking at BIF-5 – the Business Innovation Factory’s fifth annual storytelling conference. I’ll be doing my best to blog when not on stage.

Jay Rogers is dedicated to transforming the auto industry. He shows us video of stories about the collapse of the US car industry to show us “what I’m up against in starting a car company today.” These headlines outline the “doubt and disbelief that it can be done differently.” He tells us, “If you don’t think its sad, terrible and destructive of value, you’re probably not living in this country today.”

“I have trouble hearing when people tell me something is improbable.”

Rogers tells us that his story starts ten years ago in 1999 as a US Marine. He was an infrantryman, removing explosives from the road. And he befriended a Shia muslim named Saffa who worked in the camp. One day on the way to work, two thugs pulled over Saffa’s car and shot his three companions. They told him that they’d shoot him and his family if he continued working with the coalition forces. Saffa came to work the next day, and said, “I decided to stand up for my people, my family, my future and came to work.”

It’s no surprise to anyone in this audience that transportation uses 71% of imported and domestic oil, he tells us. Cars and light trucks use almost all of it, and 60% of what we import is used in cars. “If we can fix this, we can get away from the two-bit thugs and towards energy independence.”

Rogers comes by his love for the automobile honestly – his grandfather owned the Indian motorcycle company, and helped invent some techniques to communicate with customers, including a newsletter that took feedback via quizzes and email – he calls this “newsletter 2.0″. His grandfather “gave me the curse – the curse of Preston Tucker,” the belief that Americans could build revolutionary, innovative automobiles. He confesses his shame that America, as a nation of technical innovators, will have a legacy of “creating milquetoast, inefficient cars.” The problem is that “cars haven’t come into the slow-food revolution” – we don’t have people like Martha Stewart telling us that we can do things ourselves. Other fields do have this culture – there’s a community of people who will encourage you to build and fly your own airplanes – why can’t we do this in car culture?

It’s hard to create innovation in the automotive industry – you want to be nimble, to start small in a business that requires massive capital expenditure. The key, Rogers tells us, is to find ways to keep people from being compulsive when they buy cars – you need them to plan ahead, to buy as they do with computers from Dell. “You can’t shove people’s head in a car and tell them, ‘you love this f-ing car’” – instead, follow Eisenhower’s advice: “Pull the string and it will follow wherever you with. Push it, and it will go nowhere at all.”

The motto of Rogers’s company, Local Motors, is “Make Cool Cars”. COOL is an acronym, for “Community, Open, Ownership, Local.” The company is based in Southeastern Massachusetts and works very closely with a community of local innovators, who love to come and talk about cars. They host design competitions and prize-based innovation systems. They’ve generated 44,000 shared designs, shared via creative commons. In the spirit of openness, they’re committed to “liberating cars to be a platform for the specialty automotive equipment market,” where he sees data about standards as a limiting factor.

To transform cars, we need to transform ownership. Harley Davidson loans perform better than GM ones, because Harley owners have a much better sense of brand identity. We like brands we identify with and brands that are local. “What’s cool in Boston is not cool in NYC. You need to be local, from the street.” And so local motos is building local microfactories – he encourages people to come to “our burgers, cars and welding events”. These factories are “in your community, in your face”, and have a close feedback loop with customers. They will create local jobs, local manufacturing, local support, local recycling and end of life cycle for the vehicles.

Rogers is committed to building cars 5 times faster, with a hundreth of the capital. They’re bringing a car called “the Rally Fighter” to the market – they’ve got 22 orders already. While they might only bring 75 cars to the market at a time, this is a move towards a tipping point,
showing that we can innovate in manufacturing, as well as software.

I’m in Providence, Rhode Island today speaking at BIF-5 – the Business Innovation Factory’s fifth annual storytelling conference. I’ll be doing my best to blog when not on stage.

Saul Kaplan, chief catalyst of the Business Information Factory, explains his role – to get the reaction started and get out of the way. BIF began under the wing of the state of RI’s economic development agency – it’s now an independent organization, finding its own way as a catalyst for business innovation in the state. Rhode Island’s a unique place to do this work – a million people in a thousand square miles. “You can see the whole movie that is Rhode Island,” Saul tells us.

Referencing Clay Shirky’s new book, Saul tells us that this is the year of the tweet, the year of finding platforms that allow you to communicate and share what you think. He sees the platforms as a way to share new, underformed ideas and get rapid feedback on whether they’re any good or not. (To hell with Twitter – I’m going to throw out my underdeveloped ideas on stage in front of a couple hundred people… :-)

Kaplan outlines his vision for the sort of innovation he wants to see coming out of the BIF summit – Innovation that delivers value by solving problems; innovation as a team sport, focused on collaboration; innovation as experimentation, “off the whiteboard and onto the ground”.

Saul admits that he started BIF, thinking as a consultant. Meeting with Richard Saul Werman, the founder of the TED conference, he presented a matrix – the consultant’s favorite tool – with a thorough outline of what problems need to be solved and how a convening solves it. Werman dismissed him quickly, saying, “You have a lot to learn about building an event.” You build these events like dinner parties, Werman argues – you invite the people you’re excited about, and you bring people who want to hear them tell stories, and you let them talk. And that’s what the next two days are about.

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Michael Samuelson, the President & CEO for The Health & Wellness Institute, tells us that he wasn’t able to join the speakers dinner last night because he was addressing 200 breast cancer survivors. “This is the great thing about Rhode Island – you can wake up late, not know where you’re going and still get there early.”

Samuelson tells us a story from his past – he ran into an old friend who was looking very ill. Asking about how the friend was doing, he discovered the friend was through a second round of chemotherapy, and had just had a radical mastectomy. Despite years in the medical field, Samuelson tells us, he’d never met a man with breast cancer.

“For the first time in my life, I did a self breast exam on the streets of Ann Arbor – turns out you can do anything on the streets of Ann Arbor and no one will say anything.” He found something in his breast, something hard, like a BB. He spoke to doctors he worked with in the past, and all dismissed his concerns – “I’m sure it’s just a cyst”. One doctor finally offered him a choice – a mamogram, or removing the cyst. He chose the latter… and decided to have the cyst removed without anesthesia or sedation. As the surgeon cut into it, the room got very quiet. At the end of a long procedure, the surgeon said, “I don’t know what this is, but I don’t think it’s cancer.”

It was. A grade three tumor. Samuelson had a radical mastectomy and went through intense treatment to survive cancer. He tells us, “Men die of embarrasment, not of pathology.” But the cancer transformed his life, not ended it – it turned him into a mountain climber, someone who’s summited Everest while taking tamoxophin, a drug that induces symptoms of menopause… even in men. (He says his wife recommends that all men take the drug for at least six months so they can share the experience of hot flashes.) Innovation is a journey, a risky one… but journeys are transformative, and the stories we tell about them shape not just our lives, but can influence those around us.

• ????????? OOPS,Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System
  Open courseware translation project via a large team of Taiwanese volunteers. A small set of professional editors, a couple thousand translators, and a founder who made his fortune translating the Lord of the Rings into Chinese. Very, very cool.
  (tags: web2.0 translation education opensource MIT chinese china english opentranslation socialtranslation)
• M.I.T. Education in Taiwan, Minus the Degree – New York Times
  Noam Cohen piece on a Taiwanese project called OOPS, designed to translate open courseware materials into Chinese. The project has four dedicated editors and thousands of volunteer translators, and is engaged in translating MIT's Open Courseware.
  (tags: translation opentranslation opensource openeducation education curiculum chinese english volunteer socialtranslation)

• Do social networks have a business model? : ::: Think Macro :::
  Alternative models for social networks based on providing users with advanced features. Focuses on two Russian-language Facebook alternatives
  (tags: russia facebook socialnetwork socialmedia economics businessmodels)
• Dutch ISPs Sign Anti-Botnet Treaty – Hacked Off – Dark Reading
  Major Dutch ISPs agree to cooperate in the hopes of eliminating botnets. Because the "treaty" is so widespread, it's likely to force many infected users to address their zombie problems.
  (tags: security collaboration ISP netherlands botnet ddos)