I spent several exhilarating days last week at the Business Innovation Factory’s Collaborative Innovation conference (known as BIF-2). You’ve already heard about the blogjam we did from there – eight bloggers all posting real-time on the same blog! For the record, besides myself the bloggers were Allan Tear, Steve Hardy, Jeff De Cagna, Jeffrey Phillips, Lois Kelly, Boris Pluskowski, and Chris Flanagan. And thanks to Jeff De Cagna, there are also podcasts with Tim Westergren (Pandora.com), Larry Keeley (Doblin), Jane Fulton Suri (Ideo), Jeannene Rae (Peer Insight), Frans Johansson (author, The Medici Effect), Jim Lavoie (RITE-Solution), and Alph Bingham (InnoCentive).

Here's a little background on the Business Innovation Factory. It’s a nonprofit started by Saul Kaplan, as a way to “leverage Rhode Island's size and densely connected networks to create a real world laboratory for testing new ideas.” The model is collaborative, as part of Kaplan’s vision is to use Rhode Island as “the perfect breeding ground for innovation.” In particular, Kaplan saw a unique opportunity for Rhode Island to serve as a laboratory for collaborative innovation projects that encourage public/private sector partnership.

Kaplan set the tone at the beginning of BIF-2 by saying “Innovation is about delivering value – it’s not about invention.” BIF, said Kaplan, “is about experimentation, collaboration, getting outside of silos.” So it makes sense that the conference it itself was remarkably un-siloed. The goal was to bring before the audience at Trinity Repertory Theater in Providence a set of storytellers you might want at your dinner party, and then give them each just 15 minutes to tell their story. After each set of four storytellers, there was a 45-minute break for networking, further conversation, and collaboration.

It’s different, but it worked. The selection of speakers was so excellent that the lack of structure was actually OK. The audience, which included a number of people who went to the first BIF conference last year, seemed up to the challenge of using their brains to connect the dots, as opposed to being force-fed with power-bullet-points.

And there was a lot of – for lack of a better word, let me say “intellectual heft” to this conference. (Even though I missed some of the stories due to work deadlines and a lost-luggage crisis!) I tried to write one succinct IdeaFlow post that captured the conference, but succinctness failed me (or I failed it!), so I’m posting a series arranged by the themes I heard the storytellers converge around: Idea, Community, Passion and Intent, and Value.