Creativity Central [Marty Baker]

A few steps from the Trinity Theater, home to BIF's 5th Collaborative Innovation Summit, there was a moment worthy of a classic photograph.  John Rogers Jr, a retired Marine dressed in a green flight suit and Carne Ross, an ex-British Diplomat walked together sharing a story. These are just two of the unusual suspects that make BIF such a draw to top innovators.

John Rogers, left the Marines and co-founded a innovative idea for a car company. Called Local Motors, it is an open-source design company that is about to roll out its first automobile called the Rally Fighter.  The vision is to create vehicles in micro-factories using local resources.  

At 29, Carne Ross became head of the Israel-Palestine Middle East Peace Section for the British Government; completed foreign service tours of Germany and Afghanistan. When he was 32, he moved to New York to be head of Middle East policy for the United Kingdom's mission to the United Nations.  "I was the British lead on Irag, negotiating international law on hard-core issues of national security -- like how to deal with weapons of mass destruction and how to respond to Al-Qaeda after 9/11. He resigned and wrote a scathing account of his experience and his growing realization of the closed and undemocratic nature of the world's diplomatic forums.

Rogers and Ross both told their stories to a sold-out crowd of 300 at the conference. But to understand the significance of BIF, you have to look beyond the stage and into the lobby, the hallways and the street beyond the theater.  This is what Saul Kaplan, Co-founder of BIF and Chief Catalyst calls a mingling of the unusual suspects.  Innovators who normally wouldn't cross paths meet and exchange ideas.

Can a ex-British diplomat and a maverick car maker (Think Tucker) influence each other? They are both taking high-risk and innovative approaches to professions wedded to convention for decades.  If you ask Kaplan, he'd say the seed has been planted and let's watch and see what happens.

Pretty good for a short walk.

More about Carne Ross:

http://www.independentdiplomat.org/

More about John Rogers

http://www.independentdiplomat.org/