The Business Innovation Factory Summit is an annual gathering of thinkers, doers, and rabble-rousers, held in Providence, Rhode Island.
I am composing this post on a plane winging its way east to Providence, Rhode Island.
My destination is the Business Innovation Factory’s annual summit: BIF-9. Three days of speakers—BIF calls them storytellers—sharing their thoughts on innovation to a rapt audience of 400. The range of backgrounds is impressive and the topics vary from innovative approaches to education, spacesuit design, cooking, and 3D printing.
BIF is fireworks for my brain.
I blogged about BIF-8 last year and have been counting the days to BIF-9 since. Not only did my time at BIF expose me to two key thinkers whose texts I use in my Comm Lead leadership course (Dave Gray’s The Connected Company and William C. Taylor’s Practically Radical) but the idea for the Comm Lead Flight Instructor was born over a meal at a Korean restaurant with a fellow BIF attendee.
What a year it has been since then.
But there is another reason I’m particularly excited for BIF-9: this year I’ve got company. Cohort 12 member Sarah Slaid is sitting a few rows behind me on the plane, her BIF-9 ticket sponsored by BIF’s Student Experience Lab. Here’s the unexpected tweet I encountered a month and a half ago from the BIF Student Experience Lab Director, Christine Flanagan:
When “Student-centered” ISN’T jargon RT @avcrofts My new Dept Flight Instructor role based on “Let Students Lead” http://t.co/rqE9xLooT8
— chrisflanagan (@chrisflanagan) August 16, 2013
What followed was the invitation by Chris to sponsor a Comm Lead student to attend BIF-9. With Sarah working with me on an independent study set for Winter Quarter on the Comm Lead leadership curriculum, this invitation could not have been more timely.
So stay tuned: we’ll be soaking up ideas and flying the Comm Lead flag over the next three days. Sarah will be posting her impressions of BIF-9 early next week, but in the meantime, you can tune in to the BIF-9 live stream on September 18-20—just keep in mind it’s East Coast time zone.