BIF’s innovation mantra finds following, mostly outside R.I.

CLEAN SLATE: Dean Meyers prepares the board used to record each storyteller's highlights, during a break in the September BIF summit. / PBN PHOTO/STEPHANIE ALVAREZ EWENS
CLEAN SLATE: Dean Meyers prepares the board used to record each storyteller's highlights, during a break in the September BIF summit. / PBN PHOTO/STEPHANIE ALVAREZ EWENS

Simon Majumdar bounces onto stage at Trinity Repertory Co. with vigor, passing waist-high, orange-yellow letters that spell “BIF.” With an English accent he begins to tell his story to a rapt audience.

“I became suicidal – absolutely the darkest time of my life,” Majumdar says, remembering back to 2006 when his mother died of leukemia and his then-successful London publishing company began to deteriorate.

“I was standing on my balcony on the fourth floor getting ready to jump and was very fortunate that the people below started cooking,” Majumdar continues. “The smell of the food started wafting up and [it] saved my life because I got more hungry than suicidal.”

The crowd’s breathless silence turns to laughter as Majumdar – now a food and travel writer, author and judge on The Food Network’s famed TV show “Iron Chef” – launches into how he now spends his life cooking and eating and exploring new ways to relish food.

- Advertisement -

Exploring new business ideas and ways to bring them to life are at the core of what the Business Innovation Factory has done for the past decade. The Providence nonprofit’s much-anticipated, annual two-day summit, which Majumdar spoke at in September, attracts more than 500 people from around the world. Attendees, dubbed “innovation junkies,” come together to meet, tell stories and re-imagine the status quo.

This year marks the organization’s 10th anniversary. While its focus has broadened considerably beyond Rhode Island, its mission to advocate for business-model innovation remains the same. It’s a mantra that’s become almost synonymous with growth for companies big and small, one reason BIF’s annual summits draw innovators from around the country.

Indeed, with the rapid rise of innovation leaders such as Uber Technologies Inc., Netflix Inc. and AirBnB Inc., longstanding businesses are now looking for new ways to stay relevant in their respective industries.

Saul Kaplan, BIF’s founder and “chief catalyst,” has advocated on behalf of innovation for the past decade. He told Providence Business News in 2005 the nonprofit was designed to try “to make innovation more central to how we reposition [Rhode Island’s] economy.”

While he sees promising signs today that Rhode Island is embracing innovation – especially within the last five years – he’s admittedly disappointed with the pace at which it’s happening.

“I think there should be a greater sense of urgency about making some of these structural changes to what we’re doing, so of course I’m impatient,” Kaplan said. “All innovation junkies are, because they want to see more positive progress.”

Frustration in that area is what led Kaplan in 2008 – with Rhode Island deeply mired in the Great Recession – to leave his insider role as the state’s top economic-development official. When he left he effectively took BIF with him. The move quickly put the nonprofit on a path to self-sufficiency by focusing its attention “wherever the conditions are right,” Kaplan said.

BUILDING A FACTORY

BIF first surfaced out of R.I. Economic Development Corp., today known as R.I. Commerce Corp., in a Jobs Partnership proposal to the General Assembly in 2005. The proposal mapped out a laundry list of initiatives aimed at changing the economic environment in Rhode Island, which included a “business-innovation factory,” described then as “a place for companies to try new ideas.”

Kaplan had joined the EDC in 2003, after previously working as a consultant for the pharmaceutical and health care industries.

“I never paid that much attention to the local community [until then],” Kaplan said. “But I didn’t want to be on planes anymore, and I wanted to explore what was going on [in Rhode Island].”

Before too long he became deputy director under former EDC Director Michael McMahon and eventually took over McMahon’s position in 2006.

But two years later Kaplan and the state parted ways, after what he describes as a disagreement about what should have been done during the economic downturn. As the state’s jobless rate rose quickly, Kaplan said, he wanted to continue to focus the local economy around innovation and entrepreneurship, but state political leadership wanted to maintain the status quo.

“The only viable strategy that I saw was to stay on this path of repositioning the economy, and so it seemed to me that I could have a bigger impact on the conversation outside of state government,” Kaplan said.

Although always technically separate, the nonprofit was as entangled with the state as Kaplan at that time and did receive some state funding in the early years.

Cutting the cord with the state, however, opened BIF to outside markets – which has proven good for business.

MORE THAN A SUMMIT

Despite a ticket price that has now grown to $2,000, the annual summit has sold out consistently, with a number of repeat participants.

Speakers, dubbed “storytellers,” present to the crowd in a format similar to the famed TED Talks, created in 1984 by Richard Saul Wurman, who Kaplan calls a friend.

Storytellers are not compensated, and while Kaplan says that deters a handful of people each year, speakers are often banging at BIF’s door for the chance to talk.

Alex Tapscott, a Canadian author from Toronto, was invited to speak at this year’s BIF summit. He described the experience as “downright intimidating being included in a group of such exceptional individuals.

“Going to BIF is like entering an exclusive community made up of brilliant, compassionate and visionary people,” Tapscott wrote in an email. “There is so much talent, energy and determination to improve the world, and each person brings a different approach. That compels you to rethink how you’d approach a problem and inspires action.”

Tapscott is currently writing a book called “Blockchain Revolution” with his father, Don Tapscott – bestselling author of “Wikinomics” – about blockchain technology.

“You quickly find out that every person has a story to tell and that you can inspire people, just as they inspire you,” he added.

But the summit, albeit well-known, has increasingly become only a small part of BIF’s mission since Kaplan left the EDC in 2008 to work full time at the nonprofit.

Today it employs 20 full-time workers and in 2013 – the most recent federal filing year available – the nonprofit generated $2.2 million in total revenue, nearly double what it made in 2011. The summit in 2013 represented 12.6 percent of total revenue, according to the filing.

“In the beginning it was just the summit, which always paid for itself and continues to pay for itself, but we don’t make a lot of money off of it,” Kaplan said. “It wasn’t until we built the project part of this that we could really expand and grow it.”

INNOVATION, NOT INVENTION

With the rise of big-name companies such as Uber, Netflix and AirBnB, the word “innovation” has become a business buzzword.

But it’s hardly a new concept, says University of Rhode Island economist Liam C. Malloy.

“Innovation is not any different than it ever was, but there’s this new idea of innovation – or disruption – that’s caught the attention of people,” Malloy said. “There’s no difference between innovating something now than it was in the 1950s; it’s just there are different products, different services and different tools.”

Indeed, the term innovation often gets clumped together with the successes of big, revenue-generating startups, but as Kaplan points out, innovation can happen anywhere.

“Most of what business-model change is about has nothing to do with invention,” Kaplan said. “It has to do with the freedom to play with the parts in a different way to change how value is delivered.”

In between summits, BIF works with individuals and businesses to design and test new business models, with a goal “to help people live meaningful, healthy and productive lives.” The projects, or “Experience Labs” as they’re called, are BIF’s economic lifeline – or “flywheel,” as Kaplan calls them – accounting for 83.8 percent of their total revenue in 2013, according to federal filings.

BIF estimates it has completed more than 50 innovation projects through its Experience Labs, averaging about five a year.

What type of local impact this work is having is unclear, however, as BIF couldn’t provide a breakdown of how many of these projects happened in Rhode Island or the region.

Kaplan says his team always considers whether a model would fit Rhode Island’s market, but stresses that BIF is first and foremost interested in working with organizations and leaders who have a genuine appetite for change – and who will sponsor the work.

This prerequisite takes the BIF team all over the country, including a current project in Dallas working on redesigning a health care system with the Children’s Medical Hospital of Dallas.

“A lot of people will say they want [change], but they don’t really mean it,” Kaplan said. “As a nonprofit, we can be very selective about the projects we want to take on.”

LOCAL APPETITE

So does that appetite exist in Rhode Island?

Kerry Tuttlebee believes it does.

Tuttlebee attended the BIF summit last year and remembers hearing people talk about “taking your moonshot and going big,” which is what she’s doing with one of the newest public schools in Providence – 360 High School.

The school, which opened along with Evolutions High School in September, is much different than other public high schools, as it’s designed around the student, allowing them to direct the learning model and choose what they want to learn.

“It’s about really understanding what students need to learn,” Tuttlebee said.

BIF, which had been working on a separate but similar model called student-design education, combined forces with Tuttlebee – the school’s principal who’s supported through a Carnegie Corp. grant – and helped in the design process of the school. BIF was sponsored by the Rhode Island Foundation and other donors.

Tuttlebee says it was encouraging to have an organization like BIF to work alongside.

“They believe in the work we’re trying to do,” she said. “To be connected to a like-minded community to help us dream big and push ourselves is amazing.”

Diane St. Laurent, URI professor of practice, innovation and entrepreneurship, has been taking about 20 MBA students to the BIF summit for the past four years. She says it melds well with their curriculum, which includes working on innovation projects sponsored by local organizations, such as CVS Health Corp., WaterFire and IGT.

Innovation has picked up steam over the last decade in the Ocean State, St. Laurent says, and she believes BIF has had a part in spurring that change.

“Rhode Island has come a long way,” St. Laurent said. “The ecosystem has really flourished for innovation.”

As he did when he was working for the EDC, Kaplan touts Rhode Island’s size as a strength, especially within the realm of innovation.

“The population is pretty flat, so we’re not going to grow by adding a bunch of new people; we’re going to grow by adding value, and to add value we need to be a place where you can introduce new products, service and business models,” Kaplan said.

He argues Rhode Island is a great place for people who want to test new business models.

“You can stand out here,” he said. “It’s crowded up in Boston.”

But it remains unclear whether Rhode Island is finally committed to pursuing and promoting innovation at all levels, as Kaplan urged a decade ago.

There’s burgeoning optimism about the current administration’s push for innovation, as Gov. Gina M. Raimondo says she’s committed to implementing “innovative solutions” to improve state agencies across the board.

An “Innovation Voucher” program was included in the state’s new incentive program announced last month. It would grant businesses with fewer than 500 employees up to $50,000 to fund research and development assistance from a Rhode Island university, research center or medical center. The program “will be available soon,” according to R.I. Commerce Corp.

But Malloy says the state is still lagging.

“A lot of growth comes out of what we identify as clusters, so this is everything from the biotech in Boston, to the Internet clusters in San Francisco and Seattle to the nanotechnology cluster in Albany, [N.Y.],” Malloy said. “We haven’t found what our comparative advantage is.”

And while the Rhode Island jobless rate continues to fall, there’s stagnation in job creation, which suggests to economists that people are either dropping out of the workforce, retiring or leaving the state altogether.

Malloy believes the state could benefit from tapping its natural strengths, including design, oceanography and proximity to Boston. A foundation of incentives to allow entrepreneurship to flourish wouldn’t hurt either, he says, because it would allow innovation to occur naturally and prevent the state from trying to pick and choose winners, which has gotten it into trouble in the past.

Can BIF play a more active role in making that happen?

Kaplan says that’s largely dependent on the state and its leaders.

“I used to think that if I went at it hard and long enough I could convince you to change, but that’s not how change happens,” Kaplan said. “Change happens when you’re ready to change.” •

No posts to display