Fireside Chat: Nicholas Negroponte - Event Recap

On Tuesday, January 25^th, MITX had its first event of the year, and it was fitting that it came at the end of our blog series about 2011 predictions. Fitting, because our first event was a fireside chat with Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, Founder of the One Laptop Per Child non-profit, and all-around thought-leader and forward thinker in our industry. Larry Weber moderated the discussion, which covered Negroponte’s views and predictions on the intersection of technology, media and entertainment and where it’s all heading.

Fortunately, Dan Small Productions filmed the event, so you can watch the coverage to relive the experience, or view it for the first time if you weren’t able to join us! To give the videos a quick intro, I want to share some of the most interesting (and most tweeted) moments during Negroponte’s talk:

Boston is the birthplace of innovation. We should be proud of that.  (@MITX)

When discussing the struggle to attract and keep talent in New England, Negroponte gave the great alternative view that we should be proud to be the "birthplace" and strive to foster the birth of successful people, businesses and trends. He challenged the audience to find a city that has been the birthplace of more ideas, inventors, and creations than Boston.

Business school is the past, design school is where it’s at. (@burly_adopter)

Definitely a provocative statement when sitting in a room full of Bostonians, many of whom have attended some of the best business schools in the world! But Negroponte had the courage to state what many are beginning to draw as an irrefutable truth: design skills are rare, yet integral to future business success.

The last thing you want to do is listen to your customers. That's not how you 'think out of the box.' (@MITX)

Everyone remember what Henry Ford said about making the first car? “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.”  To have a future full of technological advances as epic as that of the jump from horse to car, we have to be willing to stray from our social media tendencies of listening, and instead step up and create what couldn’t be imagined from just listening.

Of course these are just a few of many great discussions that took place, so please enjoy the event for yourself with the footage below! Please forgive the monolith formation of videos, but I didn't want to leave a single second of the event out.

And once everyone is caught up on all the great moments from the event, I would love to hear which quotes and topics from the event were your favorite - so leave your comments below!