I'm now ensconced in the bloggers' perch, on the balcony overlooking the stage at the Nokia Theater in NYC (two blocks from Times Square), ready to take in the talks at HSM's Innovation Forum - Clayton Christensen, CK Prahalad, Paul Saffo. Big names. BIG conference.
Of course innovation is a big topic, too. So large a topic that there are lots of sub-topics, and sub-sub-topics. But these are the leading thinkers, so I'm expecting leading thoughts.
As I look down on the crowd below sitting in the darkened theater I see a whole array of lit up PDA screens, as people check through their email, some going online, some just tooling through messages, creating the vision of a deep sea punctuated by an assortment of glowing fish, winking on and off occasionally.
Now in the afternoon, we're listening to Vijay Govindarajan, who is making LOTS of references to CK Prahalad, but I only see a very few bright PDA screens in the audience below me. They (we) are definitely paying more attention...
I’m now looking down on the audience at the HSM Innovation Forum, at 11:20 in the morning on the first day, during CK Prahalad's talk, and guess what? When a speaker is more boring, I see more glowing PDA screens being displayed. It’s like a People-Meter -- my own little quantitative measurement of the degree to which a speaker is engaging his audience!
After Paul Saffo, CK Prahalad is off to a slow and boring start. He’s a super smart guy, but a less-than-captivating speaker, unfortunately. Not that Saffo was captivating, it’s just that his material seemed more interesting, while CK’s is more academic-sounding. So the People-Meter shows a lot of people tuning out of CK's talk and tuning in to their PDAs.