I will be attending the World Innovation Forum in NYC on June 8-9th [disclosure: I have a free pass to the conference as a blogger; I am under no obligation to write anything].  I’ve done some background checks, researching the line-up of speakers, and wanted to share what I’ve found.  I like to understand a bit of their backgrounds so that I’m ready for the rapid-fire rotation that we’ll see.  

I find that reviewing the speaker’s most recent book summary, blog posts and Twitter are useful, so I created a spreadsheet with all of this information (click on the image below to be taken to the Google Document Spreadsheet).  

On the spreadsheet, you can follow links by highlighting a cell and clicking the arrow that appears to the left of the cell.

I’m excited by what I’ve learned already — the conference has a good mix of academics, executives and entrepreneurs.  Twitter has grown a lot in the last year; not only is one of the founders, Biz Stone, a speaker, but seven other speakers have active Twitter accounts.  I found some good multimedia content including speeches from Pfizer CEO Jeff Kindler, podcasts from former Amazon Chief Scientist Andreas Weigend, and an episode of the Colbert Report with Teach for America’s Wendy Kopp.  

Over half of the speakers are authors, and there is a mix of how much material can be found online for free. Michael Porter’s website on Harvard Business Review is fantastic, there is also a lot of content for the environmentally conscious on Joel Makower’s website and Jeffrey Hollender’s Seventh Generation company’s site.  Seth Godin is a prolific blogger and author; he also has two great TED videos (of course, it’s rare that I find a TED video that I don’t love).  I’m sure that I’ll be adding to my bookshelf after attending the conference.

Remote Participation

In addition to the free content delivered through Twitter and blogs, HSM is also offering a full live webcast [for a fee] of the conference.  As for what you can expect from Twitter and blogs, see my posts from last year’s World Innovation Forum and World Business Forum.  

Make sure to check out all of the members of the Blogger’s Hub; I’m looking forward to catching up with friends from last year’s conferences and meeting some new bloggers.  The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #wif10 and you can follow me @stu.

Please post a comment with any additional resources, suggestions or questions that you have for the speakers.

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com