Burning Questions Panel (23 May)

C2montreal — Fri, 18 May 2012 13:44:02 +0000

Wednesday, May 23rd
1:20 PM | Le Main / NCG

This is your opportunity to tell us what you really want to talk about. What keeps you up at night? What is your greatest challenge or opportunity? This first of a series of Burning Questions panels will address a topic submitted and voted on by participants on opening night. Share your questions, then our multidisciplinary panellists will choose four to address. See Connect at C2-MTL section, p. 10 for details.

Panellists:
Shashi Caan
Founding Principal, Shashi Caan Collective
Jeff Chu
Editorial Director, Fast Company Live
Michael Yanover
Head of Business Development, Creative Artists Agency
Moderated by Lotfi EL-Ghandouri, Founder, Creative Society and The Hub Madrid

Burning Questions Panel (May 25)

C2montreal — Fri, 18 May 2012 13:30:52 +0000

Friday, May 25th
10:30 AM | Le Main / NCG

This is your opportunity to tell us what you really want to talk about. What keeps you up at night? What is your greatest challenge or opportunity? This series of panels will address topics suggested and voted on by the audience 24 hours beforehand. Share your questions, and our multidisciplinary panellists will choose a few to address. See Connect at C2-MTL section, p. 10 for details.

Commented by Raymond Bachand, Member for Outremont, Québec Liberal Party, Minister of Finance, Minister of Revenue, Government of Québec and Sam Hamad, Minister of Economic Development, Innovation and Export Trade, Minister responsible for the Capitale-Nationale. Member for Louis-Hébert, Liberal Party of Québec, Government of Québec

Panellists:

Laurent Simon
Associate Professor of Management, HEC Montréal
MosaiC

Mitch Joel
Author and President, Twist Image

Bonin Bough
Vice-President of Global Digital and
Consumer Engagement, Kraft Foods

Tim Barber
Executive Creative Director, Odopod

Julie Payette
Astronaut and Québec Scientific Delegate to the United States

Mouna Andraos Principal, Daily tous les jours

Moderated by Lotfi EL-Ghandouri, Founder, Creative Society and The Hub Madrid

Startup Mindset Panel

C2montreal — Fri, 18 May 2012 03:20:59 +0000

Friday, May 25th
10 h 00 | Le Main / NCG

The essence of building a web start-up is about doing more for less, testing assumptions and working with your customer base to build the next generation of products. Start-up thinking is revolutionizing many longstanding, slow-moving industries. This panel will highlight start-ups that have revolutionized commerce and helped big companies reinvent their ways of thinking.

Panellists:
Tara Hunt
CEO, Buyosphere

Marc Gingras
Sr. Director, Handheld Applications, Research In Motion

Sylvain Carle Serial CTO and Social Hacker

Moderated by Philippe Telio, Founder, International Startup Festival

Deborah Dugan and the Sid Lee Boot Campers

C2montreal — Fri, 18 May 2012 03:08:09 +0000

CEO (RED)

Thursday, May 24th
5:10 PM | Le Main / NCG

Inspi(RED) to Innovate

How can a multidisciplinary approach boost the creative process? How do collaboration and intensity combine to foster innovation?

Deborah Dugan is the chief executive officer of (RED). Deborah formerly served as president of Disney Publishing Worldwide. From 2007 to 2009, Deborah was President and chief executive officer of Entertainment Rights, a publicly traded company out of London. Deborah also served as executive vice-president at EMI/Capitol Records from 1990 to 1998. Previously, she headed legal services for Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts, and began her career as an attorney on Wall Street.

Commented by Marc Petit, Senior Vice-President, Media and Entertainment, Autodesk.

Jennifer Yuh Nelson

C2montreal — Fri, 18 May 2012 02:57:26 +0000

Director, DreamWorks Animation

Thursday, May 24th
14 h 40 | Le Main / NCG

Institutionalizing Creativity

Can we institutionalize creativity as a new core competency to drive business performance?

Jennifer Yuh Nelson made her feature film directorial debut with Kung Fu Panda 2. The film made her the highest-grossing female director in the history of the global box office. At DreamWorks Animation since 1998, Jennifer has previously worked at HBO Animation in Japan and Korea. She has a BFA in illustration from California State University and has published several independent comic books.

Presented by Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Family Foundation

Fast Company World Changers Panel

C2montreal — Fri, 18 May 2012 02:33:47 +0000

Thursday, May 24th
2:00 PM | Le Main / NCG

A discussion about how creativity, technology and passion can combine to ignite social transformation..

Panellists:

Claire Diaz Ortiz
Leads Social Innovation, Twitter

Tal Dehtiar
Founder & President, Oliberté Footwear

Olajide Williams,
Founder and President, Hip Hop Public Health

Moderated by Jeff Chu, Editorial Director, Fast Company Live

Fast Company Storytellers Panel

C2montreal — Fri, 18 May 2012 02:10:56 +0000

Wednesday, May 23rd
2:30 PM | Le Main / NCG

For creators and brands, a great story is the fundamental unit of human understanding. Hear from three storytellers who use different means to make an emotional connection with an audience.

Panellists:

Rachel Shechtman
Founder of STORY, Consultant, Entrepreneur

Andrew Wilson
Vice-President, EA Sports

Masashi Kawamura
Creative Director/Co-founder PARTY Inc.

Moderated by Teressa Iezzi, Editor, Co.Create and Staff Editor, Fast Company Online

More play, less talk: deconstructing the C2-MTL experience

Clavergne — Sat, 12 May 2012 14:19:31 +0000

Drawing up the main/off/hack concepts back in the day (via Daily tous les jours)

It’s enthralling to create something entirely new. The possibilities are endless and, at times, dizzying. During those heady early weeks of imagining the C2-MTL experience, we talked lots, dreamed lots, and drank lots of tea.

Our curator, Jean-François Bouchard of Sid Lee, had quite a clear vision of the event, so we knew that C2-MTL would break the mold; that it would be non-traditional and immersive; that it would invite people to experience creativity and its relationship with commerce, rather than just hear about it.

But within those confines, almost anything was possible. The ideas kept pouring – the hardest part came when we realized we couldn’t possibly make all of them fit into a three-day event, and that we were going to have to choose some.

During this process, I worked very closely with Melissa Mongiat and Mouna Andraos, of Montreal-based design studio Daily Tous les jours. Melissa and Mouna were given the challenging task of defining the C2-MTL experience, and here is what they thought.

Main:

C2-MTL is a one-track event. Unlike other conferences where there are many sessions happening in different rooms, here we have one stage and a linear experience. This allows for very strong collective moments, and a shared experience and thought process.

Off:

To balance out the collective Main experience, we need an equally strong emphasis on “off” moments. So we’ve built an innovation village around C2-MTL, with diverse spaces, lounges, an urban garden, a plaza, smaller rooms for private events and a collective space for communal work. This is where participants can talk in smaller groups, join partner initiatives, hold meetings, or attend a workshop. This part of the experience is personable and interactive.

Hack (a.k.a. my favorite part):

This is where we allow for a certain amount of disruption. We want participants to make the experience their own, to be able to push our content further, to divert it, and to customize their contribution. In order to do this, we’re putting a few tools at participants’ disposal.

¨ A mobile app to comment on the conversation, with a “Meet Me” button to facilitate face-to-face meetings

¨ A roaming team of concierges whose task is to capture the conversation and help people make connections

¨ An editorial team to research, analyze and challenge speakers’ content

¨ The Burning Questions series, where participants vote on the topics of a series of panels

¨ A recap presentation and in-depth e-book, so that participants can share the event’s insights with others

Yes, it is gutsy to bring these elements (more typical of the unconference world) to a business conference, and no, I’m not sure how it will pan out.

But we just weren’t comfortable with treating the event as a spectator sport. So many conferences have rigid content, already set in stone before it’s even begun. Speakers have prepared their talk, they press “play”, people in the audience listen, then they go home.

To me, it was important from the start to offer “evolving content”. The ideas shared by speakers are only the first layer; then we’ll collectively push the conversation further, and take it somewhere else entirely; from that point we will launch the conversation towards 2013.

I hope you’ll join us.

- Nadia Lakhdari, C2-MTL Editorial and Content Director
@nadialakhdari

Marc Chapman

C2montreal — Wed, 09 May 2012 18:49:03 +0000

Managing Partner, IBM Global Business Services (GBS)

Tuesday May 22
7:15 PM | Le Main / NCG

IBM 2012 CEO Study

What are the core findings of the IBM 2012 CEO Study? What is their relevance against a wider business backdrop? What new direction do they signal?

Marc Chapman, Managing Partner with IBM Global Business Services (GBS), heads IBM’s world-wide consulting and transformation services. He is responsible for providing strategic direction and operational management for a large team of associates and consultants offering public and private sector customers innovative business solutions.

Reinvention, from revolutionary to evolutionary

Clavergne — Tue, 08 May 2012 14:46:30 +0000

In the spirit of stimulating the conversation on commerce and creativity before the launch of the event on May 22nd, the C2-MTL team called on the inestimable help and expertise of social media partners Twist Image to challenge the C2-MTL community on Facebook and Twitter (check out the app here).

Participants were invited to share their insights, which gave them the chance to win free tickets to the event.

The latest challenge asked the community to come up with ideas on how we may reinvent businesses looking forward: “If you could reinvent a business, how would you do it?”.

There were no constraints but one: that the proposition fit in 140 characters or less, that is, that it be tweeted (tagging #reinvention and @C2MTL).

The C2-MTL team received 125 original submissions, ranging from novel problem-solving methods to early and continuing education propositions, calling on diversity and entrepreneurship, and founded as much on the systematic deductive power of the human brain as on the inspired burst of the artistic mind.

And the winner of the Twitter #reinvention challenge is…

Check out winning answers of all challenges on C2-MTL’s Facebook page.

As communicators, managers, business consultants, students, designers, copywriters and entrepreneurs contributed their inspiration for the future of business, the words of Sid Lee’s President, Jean-Francois Bouchard, came to mind: “We change even things that we do well: it’s the status quo that generates the risk.”

Indeed, from what was gathered, the pervasive necessity to cultivate an ethos of perpetual change seems to capture the spirit of the time; throughout the twittersphere resonated a distant echo from the groundbreaking work of Nonaka and Takeuchi:

“The essence of innovation is to re-create the world according to a particular ideal or vision. To create new knowledge means quite literally to re-create the company and everyone in it in an ongoing process of personal and organizational self-renewal. It is not the responsibility of the selected few – a specialist in research and development, strategic planning, or marketing – but that of everyone in the organization”
(NONAKA, I. & H. TAKEUCHI (1995), The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation)

Both at the helm of the board of directors and on the dynamic assembly lines of contemporary ventures, creativity has to come from everyone, be supported by everyone, and benefit everyone.

No doubt, reinvention is a collective effort. And that is, in part, why and how we put together this event.

All C2-MTL challenges are over for now.

But stay tuned, and keep talking on Facebook and Twitter. C2-MTL is in 14 days, and we’re just getting started.

- Francis Gosselin / Louis-Félix Binette

Editor: Caroline Lavergne, C2-MTL