4 minute read 8 Apr 2019
Acrobat performers Innovation Realized

How experience and content can combine to augment human potential

By Gil Forer

Digital and Business Disruption leader | Global Markets

Leads digital go-to-market strategy. Focused on the impact of disruption and what’s after what’s next. Founder and producer of Innovation Realized.

4 minute read 8 Apr 2019

The Innovation Realized Summit experience unlocks creativity through an understanding of the power of human emotion and behavior.

In this Transformative Age, change comes at an exponential magnitude and pace. Disruption shifts market power among competitors, presents opportunities for new business models, remakes industry fabrics and empowers customers to be our co-creators, generating new opportunities.

To survive, navigate and seize the upside of disruption, business leaders must embrace a different mindset, harnessing their creativity to build the open, hyper-connected enterprises the future demands now. It is also a time when the only no-go area is anyone’s comfort zone. This mindset is perhaps best described by Thomas Friedman when he observed, “I don’t think outside the box. I also don’t think inside the box. I think without a box”

The Innovation Realized Summit was built on the idea that conversations and creative collisions among a diverse group of leaders with a shared interest in without-a-box thinking can transform the world.

I don’t think outside the box. I also don’t think inside the box. I think without a box.
Thomas Friedman

Now in its fifth year, the Summit has become a platform for innovation based on a continuous design thinking process focused on human-centered experience. Each year, the Summit experience is brought to life in a new iteration that reflects a renewed understanding of participant issues that is infused throughout the agenda.

As a result, the agenda drives knowledge exchange, stimulating peer-to-peer discussions and practical outcomes through workshops and masterclasses enabled by hands-on facilitation. It also provides ample opportunities for both structured and unstructured networking and knowledge sharing.

This Summit’s agenda and experience design aim to provide a careful balance of inspiration and education in the form of learning, skills development and solutions. We want to create robust opportunities for self-development along with the development of a community of peers. Key to this is continuing to enhance the immersive experience to encourage interactivity.

The immersive experience begins with unique design features to eliminate waiting lines, concierge services for all to provide a carefree experience and a menu composed with the understanding of human needs at different hours of the day. The total result is the “island effect,” which removes executives from their day-to-day mindset, and encourages open conversations and sharing to drive better questions. 

Watch this video to see a tour of the unique Innovation Realized Summit venue:

Innovation Realized hanging chairs

Innovation Realized

At the Innovation Realized Summit 2019, we convened brilliant minds to collaborate on how to solve the now, explore the next and imagine what's after what's next.

Discover more

We know this: unusual environments and experiences trigger emotional responses that spur creativity. Intense emotions can help lower our associative barriers, allowing us to think laterally, see hidden connections and link ideas in new ways.

But how do you go a step beyond so that the immersive experience doesn’t just complement content but augments it? We know this: unusual environments and experiences trigger emotional responses that spur creativity. Intense emotions can help lower our associative barriers, allowing us to think laterally, see hidden connections and link ideas in new ways.

That’s why, every year, we start with a blank canvas and build a multi-day, multi-sensory, immersive platform that helps participants get out of their comfort zone and stimulates creative thinking. From meeting spaces fashioned to provoke feelings of play, tranquility or whimsy to the evocative aromas from an on-site bakery and carefully designed soundscapes, every cubic inch of the Summit environment is crafted to spark the emotions that free our minds to create.

The peak-end rule

The peak-end rule, first articulated by Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, shows that humans are biased to remember the peak moments of emotional intensity and the end of an event. For this reason, the Summit delivers something new and unexpected from the moment of arrival and throughout each day. Spark sessions at the end of the agenda provide a capstone to the event, giving participants an opportunity to consolidate their insights from the two-day agenda and co-create an action agenda with their peers.

Achieving this requires treating the Summit experience as much more than the moment of two days in April. We implement an insight-based communication plan in the months before the event, during the event and in the months following. As part of the registration process, we ask participants about their business challenges so that we can responsively continue shaping the agenda up until the last moment.

We also ask participants to share their personal preferences so that we can create emotional moments for them onsite or in their overnight accommodations. Working with Airbnb enables us to provide fun experiences in the hosting city as a prelude to the event.

Ultimately, the Summit is not a “conference” or an “industry event.” It’s both an exhilarating and accelerating experience fueled by its participants’ curiosity, enabled by technology and driven by creativity to unlock the best of their human potential.

Summary

At the end of this transformative experience, participants will be newly empowered to solve the now, explore the next and imagine the beyond.

About this article

By Gil Forer

Digital and Business Disruption leader | Global Markets

Leads digital go-to-market strategy. Focused on the impact of disruption and what’s after what’s next. Founder and producer of Innovation Realized.