Workshops
"Design Thinking"
Beth Johnson | Craig LaRosa | Jon Campbell
• Experience the power of working collaboratively
• Develop an understanding of how to use consumer insights
• Use abductive reasoning to explore the logic of what might be
• Understand how to define problems in full context
• Discover quick and cost-effective ways to make new ideas tangible
"Innovate/Collaborate a la parkour"
Participants will be divided into teams. After an introduction to the core ideas of Innovation Parkour, the participants will be given an assignment and given 60 minutes to complete it, report back to the rally-point and present their group's response to the challenge. We will challenge three myths of innovation: that is is always expensive, time-consuming, and requires deep specialization. Afterwards Dennis will lead a facilitated discussion. 3 days after the workshop the participants will do a writing exercise to further reflect.
Innovation Parkour was invented by Michael Dila and Matthew Milan and is expressly used with their full permission. For more info visit: www.dennisschleicher.com, www.tibetantailor.com.
Invited Presentations
"A New Model for Venture Capital: Applying Swarm Creativity and Crowd-sourcing"
Venture Capital is broken. The best investors only get 2 out 10 deals correct (i.e., 10x ROI). It is time to shift early stage investment decision making from 3 experts in a Silicon Valley boardroom to thousands facilitators, funders and founders from around the world. VenCorps is a global engaged entrepreneurial community that not only selects which opportunities get funded but then brings together thousands of passionate sets of hands, pairs of eyes and innovative minds to build those ventures funded: faster, stronger, smarter. By relying on the wisdom of the crowd and the production capabilities of community, VenCorps hopes to shift the ROI on funds invested from 2 out of 10 to 5 out of 10, an outcome that would result in hundreds of millions of additional dollars being generated for investors in VenCorps’ Fund. VenCorps: Community Powered Capital.
VenCorps is a Collaborative Online Information Network focused on applying swarm creativity, crowdsourcing, and predicative markets to increase the probability that companies our fund invests have a higher probability of success. We are to Venture Capital, what Wikipedia is to encyclopedias, Threadless is to t-shirts; Marketocracy is to public equity. VenCorps is open to all. Founders post information about their startups in video or text form. Members of the community review and rank the entries. Each month the top 9 ventures go head to head with $50,000 on the line. Through a predicative market the winner is chosen and our Fund invests $50,000 and 50,000 konos™ (or virtual currency, earned on the system through participation). Once chosen, the community rallies around the winner to help them build their startup: faster, stronger, smarter receiving konos™ in return for contributions. Those konos™ are in turn can be “cashed out” in our store for goods.
"Jumpstarting COINs in Industry"
