Creativity Central [Marty Baker]

  Henry, the eighth of that name, King and Supreme Head of the Church in England, is a fascinating footnote to the birth Providence’s Business Innovation Factory.   When the last of his Tudor heirs died in 1603, the city of London was becoming the world’s leading financial center, superseding Amsterdam in its primacy.  

It was also the year that Roger Williams was born.   He eventually became a clergyman to a wealthy family becoming a controversial figure because of his progressive ideas on freedom of worship. So, in 1630, ten years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, Roger left England and arrive at Boston in the England. Massachusetts Bay Colony.

He preached first at Salem always at odds with the structured Puritans. Banned from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his beliefs, including his support for religious toleration and the rights of Indians and his opposition to civil authority, he founded the colony of Rhode Island and the town of Providence (1636) on land purchased from the Narragansett Indians.

The colony established a democratic government and instituted separation of church and state, and it became a haven for Quakers and others seeking religious liberty.

Fast forward to an organization with the acronym RIEDC – Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation.   Our smallest state had the biggest idea --   summed up in its aspirational tag line “Building the 21^st Century Innovation Economy.”

The Business Innovation Factory (BIF) was launched in 2004.   It is an independent, nonprofit organization founded to enable collaborative innovation.   The big idea? To create a platform where public and private sector partners can collaborate across boundaries to focus on big-win projects an deliver transformative innovation.

Saul Kaplan, BIF’s chief catalyst, says “I’ve had the privilege of doing some cool things in my career, but catalyzing BIF is the coolest.   Through BIF, organizations have access to a ‘safe haven’ for experimenting with new business models, particularly through networked models that cut across organizations, industries and the public and private sectors.”

Today, Kaplan is both chief catalyst of BIF and executive director of the RIEDC.   “The big ‘aha’ for me since taking on the a public leadership role is that community matters.   And Rhode Island’s compact geography and tight-knit social networks enable innovators to explore and test new ways of doing things.”

Part catalyst and part evangelist for innovation, Kaplan relies on his experience as a strategy consultant to keep BIF’s mission in focus.   “You have to have very thick skin to span silos and foster collaboration,” he explains.   “Everyone loves the idea of innovation until it impacts them.   I used to think that we could enable large-scale change and create more innovators by proselytizing.   But that doesn’t get you past the buzzwords.   I know believe in sorting the world to identify the innovators across every imaginable discipline, then finding ways to connect them in purposeful ways.   That’s what BIF is all about.”

This week’s BIF Summit was a reflection of that philosophy.   If there was a single takeaway from the Summit it was echoed by such luminaries as IBM’s   David Yaun and Deborah Brooks co-founder of the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Disease, it’s that innovator’s need to bypass the silos and create a culture of collaboration.   Sharing and transparency were the buzzwords of BIF-4.

It was also what made the two-day event such a success.   Yes, I think Roger Williams would have approved.

MB

http://www.businessinnovationfactory.com/