InnoTown conference – with great speaker list
Wish I had heard about this before, as my schedule doesn’t allow me to go. May 23-25, the InnoTown conference is on in Aalesund, Norway. It’s about creativity, inspiration, and internationalisation.
From the program: “The aim of InnoTown is to move people’s minds, both rationally and emotionally; to inspire and enhance creativity and innovation, to help motivate people to think new thoughts and dare to fail – to succeed.”.
Marketing jargon, right. But the program is impressive!
The InnoTown program has speakers like Robert Sutton, well known for his two books “Weird ideas that work” and “The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action”. Good intervies with Robert at Fast Company and at Tom Peters. I like his honesty – this is how “Weird ideas…” starts: “I ADMIT IT. I call the novel ideas in this book “weird” to get your attention…”. He sure did.
On of his main ideas is that you should hire people that make you uncomfortable. At first this sounds very weird. But if you are going to knock your grey cells out of old habits, nothing beats having a “crazy” person forcing you to think about things, and do things in new ways.
Robert answer a question about this in the Tom Peters article so check that out.
“But the general point for managers is that if you, in your gut feeling, dislike someone, you have to examine what’s causing that. And if it’s because they think differently from you and have a different perspective, it might be good to have them around. Although not too many.”
Further on the program, is (among others) violinist Miha Pogacnik, Helen Greiner of iRobot, Rusty Rueff of EA, Tom Wujec of Alias, Michael Melvill of SpaceShipOne, and finally the brilliant Joyce Wycoff of InnovationNetwork.
Wish I could be there. Aalesund is a nice city too, even if their soccer team is… no, never mind.
Technorati tags: creativity / innovation / leadership
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