by Lois Kelly, Founder BeeLine Labs

Some interesting food for thought from the first day of today’s conference:

“It’s important to study why bad ideas stay around so long…We need to build hunch-supporting environments and find people who can help us fill out the hunch. Most business organizations not structured to do so.” Steven Johnson, author, The Ghost Map

by Lois Kelly

Dean Esserman, chief of the Providence, RI police force, reflected this morning at the BIF3 about the six years that have past since 9/11. Six years since Bin Laden promised to take down 100,000 American children. “He’s a man of his word,” said Esserman. “But we’ve done it for him. Over the past six years 100,000 young Americans have been murdered. We’re a land that buries it young. That’s the face of violence in America.”

by Lois Kelly

That was Walt Mossberg’s opening question to 37 Signals founder Jason Fried at today’s BIF-3 Collaborative Innovation Conference. “I’ve never seen a software company figure out how to deal with feature creep,” said Mossberg. “Even Quicken has become a complete mess because a small percentage of enthusiasts keep demanding more and the software companies listen to them.”

by Josh Catone

Take a sheet of paper and write down everything you can think of that's white. You have 15 seconds, go. Done? Good, now take 15 seconds and write down everything that is or could be in your refrigerator that's white. Finished? Raise your hand if had better luck with the second list.

Dan Heath, who co-authored the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die with his brother Chip, started his talk at BIF-3 this afternoon by asking the audience to complete the exercise I described above. A good number (perhaps nearly half) of audience members were able to name more white things the second time around. But that's an odd outcome, said Heath, because there are more white things that exist in the universe than in your refrigerator. The constraint, however, helped focus your thinking and made the task of identifying objects easier because of the stricter perameters.

For BIF-3, we actively recruited storytellers from all walks of life. And while diversity is the name of the game, there are a few natural themes I've noticed during the course of profiling our innovators. Two are timeless, the others are relatively new:

by Euan Semple

The biggest challenge facing organisations is not so much coercing people into being more innovative as getting themselves out of the way when people try to innovate.

Innovation almost always comes out of frustration with the status quo and is almost inevitably disruptive. If you don't let people find fault with how you do things currently or begin to disrupt your perfect systems then you are unlikely to experience innovation.

Someone made a passing – albeit complimentary – comment to me at lunch yesterday saying, “Oh, you’re with BIF - you guys hold such great events.” OK, it’s true, we do hold great events. But the meat of BIF…the stuff that keeps us going…can be found in our Experience Laboratories. With so many eyeballs on us because of the summit next week. I thought I would take the time to share one of the projects under development in our Patient Lab…

BIF Research Advisor and BIF-3 Storyteller Andrew Hargadon co-wrote a good piece which appears in September's MIT Sloan Management Review. Together We Innovate outlines how companies can come up with new ideas. Bottom line: get employees working with one another.

Organizing for innovation is the basic premise of Hargadon’s research. He shatters the accepted folklore that icons of innovation such as Henry Ford, Eli Whitney and Thomas Edison were "lone wolves" and inventors. In almost every case he’s researched, these inventors “borrowed” existing ideas and brought them together with the necessary people and materials to build on them. “Ford didn’t bother starting the Model T until he had 1500 sales agents on the ground,” he told me recently.

At it's core, a design-thinking approach to innovation focuses nearly all its energy on the end user. The process has been written about extensively - I've blogged about it before and BIF member Continuum even presented a full-day seminar on it last year. I find though that I learn better through example rather than theory. Meet BIF-3 storyteller Matt Cottam - CEO of Providence’s Tellart design studio and an adjunct professor at the Rhode Island School of Design...

I'm ashamed to admit I hadn't heard of Jay Cohen until a few weeks ago when BIF Chief Catalyst Saul Kaplan invited him to be a storyteller at our upcoming Summit. At a time when confidence in our government is critically low, I can't quite explain the security I felt after profiling the former Rear Admiral, now Under Secretary for Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate Jay M. Cohen. He's the ultimate risk management innovator...