I believe that the very heart of innovation comes down to founders who intend to change the world, and those who back them and help them achieve the impossible. I've been moved recently by the stories in Googled by Ken Auletta. We all know about Google's meteoric rise, but what wasn't clear to me before reading the book was what a crucial role people like Bill Campbell (of Intuit) played in helping the founders stay true to their vision and still get the management help that they needed to create the giant company that Google has become.
At the MassTLC Annual Meeting, Steve O'Leary, MassTLC's chairman, gave an overview of Massachusetts showing the amazing base of talent and assets that we have here. And while employment has stayed relatively flat over the last ten years, it did so in spite of two recessions, the events of September 11, the collapse of financial markets in 2008, and the decade-long trend of outsourcing and offshoring. Steve then issued MassTLC's challenge: add 100,000 new jobs in the coming decade. The MassTLC 2020 Challenge.
Steve and I worked on a combined presentation. While he would focus on the overall challenge, I sought to highlight what it all means for the early stage of innovation -- the stage that I love. The video below shows the presentation I presented using Prezi, a new presentation tool that works by moving and zooming on a single canvas. It forces you to keep your messages simple, and let them flow easily from one to the next. On the other hand, it takes longer to do this, but the results are worth it.
These two earlier posts support the messages in the video:
Here is the Play Big presentation, which includes the Shake It Up video at the end:
If you'd like to play with Prezi yourself, you can download my Prezi and work with it here.
Here the slides that Steve O'Leary presented (they came before mine, and set up the idea that we need to Play Big.
And here is the link to Tom Hopcroft's MassTLC Leadership Blog. This contains all the presentations from the Annual Meeting.