By David Ortiz
PBN Staff Writer
M.J. Kaplan, a consultant who works with RI Housing Works, got a commitment from the nationally hailed “green” architect Chris Benedict to come to Rhode Island and conduct a seminar on sustainable housing development.
Lorne Adrain, a Providence resident and founder of National Neighborhood Day, spoke with the founder of the neighborhood social networking Internet company Outside.In about using the growing company’s Web portal to build interest in Adrain’s national effort to build connections between neighbors.
And Matthew Flanagan, a managing partner of the Providence-based IT company Senjiva LLC, talked for more than half an hour with Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal’s celebrity technology columnist and a Warwick native, about their mutual interest in the business and social potentials of emerging alternative energies.
Each Rhode Islander works in a different industry, but the connections that each made with nationally recognized leaders in their fields of interest all occurred as a result of conversations they had at the third annual Collaborative Innovation Summit, a two-day conference hosted on Oct. 10-11 by the Business Innovation Factory.
The event, held this year at Trinity Repertory Company’s Lederer Theater in downtown Providence, is designed to bring together bring national leaders in business innovation with local business people, entrepreneurs, artists and designers, educators and government leaders.
Almost 350 people attended the conference, which was co-hosted this year by Mossberg and “Mavericks at Work” author Bill Taylor, and featured 29 innovation leaders in business, academia, government and the nonprofit world.
Perhaps the biggest draw this year was Mark Cuban, owner of the National Basketball Association’s Dallas Mavericks franchise, who founded both Broadcast.com, the leading provider of multimedia and streaming on the Internet, and HDNet, the world’s first national television network broadcasting all of its programming in high-definition.
Over the course of the two-day event, each speaker was given about 15 minutes to tell a story that illustrated lessons learned about the importance and challenges of innovation. Interspersed between the storytelling and panel discussion sessions were large blocks of time for networking.
And plenty of networking occurred, said Brian Jepson, a South County resident who edits Make magazine, which is owned by the influential technology publisher O’Reilly Media, and is a co-founder of the Providence Geeks, a networking group for technology professionals in Rhode Island.
“Just meeting the folks who I met there and getting an idea of where their heads are at, the sort of people who are interested in innovation, just the random conversations in the hallway – it is very helpful,” Jepson said. “It’s just very good to get thoughts from people on how my work affects them, and also to understand what they’re trying to do in their own space.”
Economic development officials hope some of the connections made at the conference will result in projects and business ventures that help build Rhode Island’s economy. Seeing such collaborations as a key to success in a highly competitive 21st-century economy, the R.I. Economic Development Corporation founded the Business Innovation Factory as an independent nonprofit funded by both the state and private industry to create platforms where public- and private-sector partners can collaborate. •
