I wasn't able to attend this year's Front End of Innovation, but here I'll cite snippets from blog posts that are themselves snippets of the conference:

Microsoft blogger Kevin Morrill included in his report this exchange from Jack Welch's speech:

"...An audience member cited a report speculating how America will need more innovation in the 21st century to compete globally and then asked who Welch thought is responsible for this, as if it was some centrally appointed person or a government agency that needed to be formed. Welch said simply: “you!” Everyone in America is responsible for innovating. He pointed out that the only job security is customers, not companies—something that’s so true, yet so under appreciated in America."

and this from Peter Senge's speech:

"Senge started by focusing on how many companies start with great missions and values, but when you really talk to people on the ground floor the company moves to a different beat. One enlightening example was a t-shirt he saw: on the back it outlined the company’s key values such as honesty, integrity, focus on the customer, etc; on the front was the Enron logo."

For Chris Conley at the cph127 Design + Innovation blog, the highlight of the conference was a dinner speech by Boston Philharmonic Orchestra conductor Benjamin Zander:

"It is hard to describe what we experienced. He basically worked through a series of stories and activities that included conducting the audience in singing Happy Birthday to one of the audience members, helping us see new distinctions through music, and demonstrating how he works with his music students by working with one right in front of everyone. His main theme is how life is a series of possibilities and how we can make amazing things happen through passion and excellence."

Chuck Frey from Innovation Tools asked his readers to send in reviews of the event....here's a snippet of a much longer review Chuck posted from Jack Hipple of Innovation-TRIZ:

" It was also interesting to hear a few presentations from industry innovation 'leaders' who had been asked to rejuvenate or start an innovation program within their companies and these presentations demonstrated some significant learnings from the last wave of these efforts in the 80's and early 90's. Many of the organizational mechanics of these programs have been greatly improved, but no one talked about the people aspects of this that have been highlighted in the past (using social and problem solving style differences to improve the effectiveness of these programs)."

If anyone else out there who attended this conference and wants to share, I'll be happy to post it, and I'm sure Chuck Frey will too.

NOTE: Post updated 6/2/05 to include Chris Conley as author of the CPH127 snippet.