This week was the most amazing industry gathering I’ve attended in a long time. This meeting was held using Cisco’s telepresence meeting rooms in San Jose, Seattle, New Jersey and New York, as well as a lot of people joining by WebEx. The meeting was a gathering of professionals, across many different companies and industries, who were all responsible in some way for innovation at their companies. I was honored to have the group request copies of BIG Ideas to BIG Results for all of the participants. It turns out that most people in corporations agree that the problem with innovation is not a lack of ideas and creativity. The problem is in effectively hearing those ideas and then organizing to get them implemented, the topic of our book.

As you can see in the sample picture below, the telepresence rooms at Cisco virtually bring together people in an environment that simulates being at the same table together with remote people. It was a huge improvement over traditional video-conferencing and a couple of times I caught myself trying to make “eye contact” with someone in one of the other locations. It’s a little strange, but created an effective group working environment.

The conference was sponsored by BrightIdea Software, who provides innovaiton management software. Prior to the conference we all used their web-storm software to run a high-engagement brainstorm for conference topics, all handled across the web in somehting like a social network and collaboration space combined. What was interesting about the Webstorm was that it allowed people to interact, share ideas, build on ideas and give feedback in their own time and location. And for people who don’t like speaking up in brainstorming meetings, it allowed them to have a voice.

The whole event was a fantastic experience. We’ve been thinking a lot about how companies can increase engagement of people in generating big ideas while reducing travel budgets and ineffective meetings. The Birds of a Feather meeting allowed me to share the book with people who are also looking to bridge the gap between ideas and results, learn from other people in companies working to make innovation more effective, and got to play with a really innovative experience with telepresence as well.

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