If you're in the Boston-New York area and are open to last-minute planning you may want to consider attending the conference "Best Practices, Tools and Techniques for Managing The Front End of Innovation," which will be held Monday through Wednesday at the Boston Marriott Quincy in Quincy, Massachusetts.

A quick description: Although many companies have dramatically improved product development cycle time and efficiency by implementing formal development processes, these processes won't work without ideas to feed them. A steady stream of new, high-quality concepts is necessary to fill a development process pipeline, and this conference is about how to manage that process -- the "front end" of innovation.

This conference has attracted a lot of attention partly because most of the main players in the world of innovation are speaking, including: Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School, John Seely Brown of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Dr. Stephanie Burns of Dow Corning, Clayton M. Christensen of Harvard Business School, Eric von Hippel of MIT Sloan School of Management, and Dean Kamen, entrepreneur and inventor of the Segway inventor.

I've written about almost all of these folks over the 18 months I've been writing this blog, so it will be no surprise to anyone that you will also find *us* at this conference! Decision Analyst Innovation Services will be an exhibitor at "Managing The Front End of Innovation," so if you come to the conference, come by our booth and meet us. Just look for the frogs!

If you want to register in advance, click on the banner ad to the right, go here, call 888.670.8200 or email register@iirusa.com.

Please note: IdeaFlow is a media partner for this conference. That means we're involved with the conference, though no actual money is changing hands! If you register because you saw this, please let them know by mentioning this priority code: M1604XIF