BIF-2 Conference. Mind-blowing innovation.

I’ve been attending the BIF-2 conference this week which explains why I’ve been a bit invisible on the site and IM, etc. The conference took place at Trinity Rep and despite decent wi-fi coverage, I kept my laptop closed for most of the conference for two reasons: 1.) the presentations were–for the most part–riveting and warranted complete attention and 2.) I was sitting next to Brian and he was doing such a great job blogging the conference that there was little need for me to do the same. If you really want to get a great feel for the speakers, you should definitely head over to www.jepstone.net for great coverage. (I should also note that Brian is the MacGyver of bloggers, at one point turning his built in mac book screen toward the stage to capture some footage of a presentation with the laptop’s built in camera. but anyway, onto my thoughts regarding the conference.)

The density of brilliance, innovation and creativity at Trinity Rep over the past two days was more than just inspiring. The spectrum of speakers and fields was as wide as each speaker’s depth of knowledge in their field (have a look at the list of speakers on this page). Each presenter had about 15 minutes to impart a story to the audience. At times 15 minutes felt too short, other times, too long. It was a bit like surfing the web in that we were jumping from topic to topic very quickly but getting into each topic with a profound sense of depth in a very short period of time. Many, though not all, of the presenters were far better and more engaging than respective web pages on their subject areas. The moderators of the presentations (Wurman on Day 1 and Mossberg on Day 2) were a bit of a dull spot on an otherwise exciting stage and they contribute much more on the web or in print than they did as moderators. I was surprised to learn that Mossberg is a native of Rhode Island.

A couple of observations:

Tim Westergren: from Pandora said that it takes up to 30 minutes for a trained musician to identify the 400 unique genetic attributes in a song before it’s added to the Music Genome dataset. Also, the folks from Pandora ran out of seed money and went two years without taking a salary before they launched this year. Also, Tim made the very observation that I’ve been mulling over for several weeks now that the absence of music as a shared source of connection in our culture needs to be fixed. Music can be democratizing, a shared cultural reference point or vocabulary that unites us.

Larry Keely: We always over-estimate the amount of change that will occur in the short term and under estimate the amount of change that will occur in the long term. So totally true.

Ivy Ross: Had a slew of interesting things to say about entrainment and brain waves. Also, when she had to merge two different design departments at Old Navy into a single team, one thing she did was to hire a documentary film-maker to shoot five-minute bios of each of the participants so that everyone would get to know each other that much more quickly. I don’t know why HR departments don’t do this as standard procedure for new hires. A movie on the intranet announcing Frank in purchasing or wherever would be hugely beneficial and SO easy to do.

And, finally, what I took home from the conference was this: Almost all of these totally inspiring innovators had one thing in common. They were all very, very analytical and decisive about what they were doing. The knew their material, their subject matter with a profound depth. However, in almost all cases, when it came to their implementations or application of their subject matter to a real-world job, the “how to make a living” from all that deep knowledge, there seemed to be a consensus that over-thinking or over-analysis was detrimental to the process and they were driven by gut instincts and intuition.