Innovation Congress

I'm here in Boston at the CIMIT Innovation Congress. What an incredible study in healthcare, innovation, and convening this has been. With years of practice and success in their CIMIT Forum, the CIMIT team has become expert at connecting people - which in turn connect ideas, research, capital, etc, etc - to the benefit of health. Not just locally around Massachusetts General Hospital, but improving patient care around the world by putting the right people in the right environments and nurturing the conditions that stimulate connection and innovation.

I will post about some particular focus sessions and elements of this conference over the coming days. Be sure to check back, because this was an incredible experience with many great speakers bringing action to he purpose and structure provided them.

For now, I just want to comment on the conditions a bit. Like many conferences, the Innovation Congress shoulders focus sessions, idea exchanges and other breakout formats appropriate to different objectives with plenary keynote speakers. Creating a conference following this formula isn't a guarantee for success, although it's the formula that people (especially this clinical and academic audience) expect. CIMIT knows this, and has put great consideration into the meeting design.

For example, they don't give speakers a time limit and topic. They give them these things, as well as some guidance and requests. Much like the TED rules, they have philosophies that hope speakers can consider. Story sharing and interactivity are central. The moderators they enlist are elite in their field of expertise, but they are coached and encouraged to create a dialogue instead of a download. The results are amazing. This thoughtfulness and engaging faculty in advance makes for an entirely different, and in my opinion superior, meeting experience.

I had tried to offer some visual component to provide some frame of reference, but my damn webcam isn't capturing video! I'll see if I can link to CIMIT's blog if they post something.

Stifling Innovation

Innovation is one of those words that I can scarcely type in here without shame. It has got to be the most hackneyed, consultant abused term that there is. The fact remains though, that innovation is critical to an organization's success. I could go on about the role and application of innovative thinking and behaviour in effective meeting design, but let's stay a little higher this time.


The role of meetings in innovation.


First, let's define "meetings". And by define, I mean let's acknowledge that a meeting can be anything, and so we won't really define it very narrowly at all. We'll call it any situation where more than one person is contributing to a challenge/opportunity. So an obvious function of meetings in innovation is people meeting to respond to an opportunity to innovate.


Having a discussion today with some leaders of MaRS Discovery District, we were expressing frustration with large and established organization's inability to innovate. Why do they seem to be so much less agile? There are many paradigms and bureaucracies that clearly stand in the way of fresh thinking, but I also believe that declining meeting practices are a massive contributor to stifling innovation.

As processes become standardized and routine, they lose visibility. Even core competencies like innovation get delegated (at some levels), are no longer assumed by groups, and eventually evaporate into procedure. Approaches to innovation also become stagnant as groups fall in love with a particular method, or fear the risk of new approaches.