The MIT Enterprise Forum Innovation Series presents a keynote speech by technology innovator Ray Kurzweil, followed by a conversation led by Sim Simeonov of FastIgnite. Full information here; registration here.
From the event description:
“Impervious to the roller-coaster ride of the financial markets, the past decade has brought about an unprecedented acceleration in technology development and adoption combined with a rapid decline in the cost of anything touched by IT. Open-source, software-as-a-service, cloud computing, user-generated content, freemium and viral distribution models share one thing in common: they lower the cost of experimentation and make it cheaper and easier to create new things while at the same time destroying existing business models.
“The democratization of innovation is a turbulent process. Rapid creation and violent destruction. Many winners and many losers, both big and small. Are there patterns of success in the chaos? Ray Kurzweil definitely thinks so. He has been on the bleeding edge of innovation for decades and his track record is something to admire. Ray was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.
“Following Ray’s keynote presentation, we will go deep with Ray on topics ranging from forecasting technology shifts and timing markets to practical techniques for fostering market-focused innovation to understanding the different roles of the individual entrepreneur vs. the team in venture creation.”