Print
Email
Print Edition Stories
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
BIF5: Innovation improves with women, open sourcing, crowd sourcing
By Rodney H. Brown
Ig Nobel Prizes 2009 award winners
Companies born in the recession
Flash Slideshow: Mass High Tech All-Stars Thought Leadership Roundtable
The debate about whether or not design is important is finally dead, according to Saul Kaplan, founder and “chief catalyst” at the Providence, R.I.-based Business Innovation Factory. Kaplan made that claim at the organization’s fifth annual convention, BIF5, being held today and tomorrow at the Trinity Repertory Theater in downtown Providence.
BIF5 brought speakers — in the BIF parlance “storytellers” — from as far away as Switzerland and as near as Wareham to talk about their experiences with innovation. Nell Merlino, the founder of the Take your Daughter to Work movement, talked about how that program helps innovate business for women, and how now 50 percent of all businesses in the United States are women-owned. Merlino also pointed out that more than 70 percent of them have less than $50,000 in annual revenue, and that the era of the “micro-loan” for women-owned businesses needs to end.
One of the most dynamic speakers of a dynamic crowd was John “Jay” Rogers Jr., the founder of Local Motors Inc., which is using crowd-sourcing concepts and open-source licensing ideas to create a new car-making company. Rogers acknowledged that much needed to change in the auto industry, but the automobile itself is not a dead concept.
“I’ll be damned if we go into the 21st Century without our cars,” he said. Much of the impetus for founding Local Motors, he said, came from his experiences serving as a Marine in Iraq and seeing how we needed to change our relationship with foreign oil.
Local Motors’ first production vehicle will debut in a few weeks in Las Vegas, Rogers said.
According to BIF excutive director Melissa Withers, more than 300 people registered for the event, and 10 percent of that total was made up of international registrants. “We’ve sold out for three years in a row,” Withers said.
RSS Feeds
Comments
Please Login/Register to post comments.
No comments have been added or approved.