Innovation and Humanity

Greetings to all of you out there in the MIPtalk Nation (with apologies to Stephen Colbert). We’ve been teasing some exciting developments about the show these past few weeks and although the image accompanying this post might lead you to believe that we’ve landed the mother of all interviews with Bill Gates, we’re not there quite yet (although there should be no doubt that such opportunities are on the horizon). What we do have to share is equally as exciting since it represents an important milestone in the journey we’ve taken thus far.

After we conducted our recent interview with author and entrepreneur Glenn Llopis he was gracious enough to extend a unique opportunity for us to work together. The results of that collaboration led to some conversations with a number of exceptional business and thought leaders who will be participating as delegates in the 2010 Innovation and Humanity Summit being held at Chapman University on January 23, 2010. Here’s a brief summary about the event (you can register here):

The 2010 Innovation and Humanity Summit will seek to represent a collaboration of the brightest / entrepreneurial minds in industry, academics, non-profit and government sectors. The Summit objective is to teach, guide and embrace one another’s ideas and ideals in order to discover and renew the ways we must think and act to propel positive social change through ethical innovation.

In addition to continuing our core mission of seeking out and engaging some of the world’s “most interesting people”, we were able to garner unique insights into strategies that can help us address the challenges we face as we tackle uncertain social and economic changes in the world around us. Some of the individuals you’ll be hearing from in the coming days include:

• Jason Jenkins –  CEO, Causeworth Insurance and Co-Founder of Human Factor Leadership Academy
• P.K. Shukla, Ph.D. – Vice Chancellor, Chapman University; Director, Leatherby Center for Entrepreneurship
• Robert C. Wolcott – Founder & Executive Director, Kellogg Innovation Network
• Navi Radjou – Executive Director, Centre for India & Global Business
• Adlai Wertman – Director of the Society / Business Lab at USC, Marshall School of Business (and MIPtalk’s very first guest)
• Esther Jeles – President, Aylet Inc. and Author, Louder Listening

One of the significant things we learned from this group is the importance of innovation in a rapidly changing marketplace. With that in mind, we also decided to make some refinements to the MIPtalk format which we’ll be introducing soon. MIPtalk is very much a labor of love for both of us but we are committed to building a community that presents non-traditional voices sharing their passion, experience and expertise.

We’re just getting started.

Your input is always welcome and greatly appreciated. Whether you prefer e-mail, Facebook, Twitter or any other form of digital communication we’d love to hear your suggestions, feedback and criticisms (and also any good recipes you can recommend).

To sum it all up, we’ll leave you with the words of an old Russian proverb:

“There is no shame in not knowing; the shame lies in not finding out.”

Stay tuned.

Your friends,

Brad and Noam