29 Oct Talking to Bruno Giussani, Director of TED Europe
By Doris Obermair
For more than 25 years Bruno Giussani has been writing about and commentating on politics, business, IT and Internet for most of the European and North American quality magazines and newspapers. This restless Swiss is also a professional conference goer, blogger, presenter and most importantly organizer. He currently manages the European agenda for one of today’s most prestigious and influential events:. In 2005 TED had its first European appearance at Oxford and 2 years later set foot into Tanzania, Africa. By doing so TED set a clear sign that 21st century Africa is not all about diseases, disasters and foreign aid programs, leaving the stage in Arusha to young African entrepreneurs, activists and politicians who want to build a future on investments rather than charity programs.
Bruno, what is TED?
TED wants to identify great ideas and people who carry these ideas in order to spread them as widely as possible. Probably nobody remembers this but «TED» means Technology, Entertainment and Design. 25 years ago the feeling was that these fields would start to converge, to influence each other, and so the conference was about gathering people from these sectors and make them interact in dialogue. In 1984 the first Macintosh computer came out and it was also the year of the first CD! Today, the conference covers basically every field of innovation and we invite people from different sectors and build them around a single theme and then shake a little bit and see what comes out in the end. A typical TED session includes a scientist, an architect, a poet or a writer, a musician and maybe a politician and they give their perspective on specific topics.
But few people ever get to be at a TED conference.
Yes, it used to be a pretty exclusive affaire but a couple of years ago we completely switched policy and started publishing the speeches online for free. Now it is really about ideas worth spreading, which is our tagline, and it has been incredibly successful.
You served over 50 million online videos of the talks in only two years.
This caught us by surprise. We expected to be successful but not to that level. I mean, these are serious talks, about String theory or particle physics or how architects create buildings. I guess part of the online success is that we do not only select good speakers but we also try to create a context for them which then makes the speech compelling to watch. We are now running about 4 million online views a month!
Especially science and research have become distant to the non-scientific community. Ideas are often not understood in the context that they were created. TED talks often show the creator behind the idea, is that part of the success?
There are many different reasons but that certainly is one of them, this approach of matching an important idea with the best person to tell that idea and explains it. But there are other elements: one certainly is to force the speakers to focus. These are people who are accustomed to give 45 minutes lectures in universities, 50 minutes speeches as politicians, two hours of presentations as architects. We squeeze them down to 18 minutes without exception.
Another force I believe, particularly now that the videos are up online for everybody to see, is the «Oh, I go and speak at TED and these are the speakers who spoke before me, so I need to be better than them!» Say, you are an architect. I invite you to come to to a talk and I send you five links of five other architects that spoke there already. That’s your benchmark. You have to do at least as good as them or better, otherwise you won’t feel good yourself. So the pressure is high on the speakers to deliver a great speech. I give you an example: the current most viewed TED talk is by Jill Taylor. She is a brain scientist. 8 years ago she had a stroke and it took her about 6 years to recover. She basically was observing this process as a scientist, being her own object of research. She wrote a book and she started talking about it but somehow she remained almost an unknown figure. Then we invited her to TED. She zealously prepared her speech, and she gave that speech 6 or 7 times in front of different audiences before coming to TED, improving it, adjusting it, figuring out whether a concept was clear or not. That is exactly what we want. We want them to commit to do the best speech of their lives. Jill Taylor’s speech has been seen more then 1 million times in 6 months and she has turned into a minor star, her life has been transformed because of that speech. One interesting aspect is that people like Al Gore or Bill Clinton are not the highest rated or most viewed speakers on our website. Nine out of ten speakers of the first 50 million views are names you may never have heard of. But they just delivered fabulous speeches, great ideas, great insights, great delivery, great passion, a lot of enthusiasm. And that was a break-through.
So where is the value added you create, apart from networking, for people who attend TED?
First of all, we really try to create a whole experience around it. That goes from the moment you get there when you receive your badge to the way the program unfolds. The other one is access. Most of the speakers come and stay for the whole duration of the conference which means, you have a question, you go up to the speaker in the break and you discuss it and very often that’s where the real spark happens, where interesting connections are created that later might turned into common projects. And then there is the whole inspiration part: people go back to their company, their office or their family even with lots of ideas. And last but not least, people also come for whom they may be sitting next to at dinner.
High entrance prices and limited tickets make it elitist party?
The only answer to this is that if we open it up to 25,000 people it is no longer a conference. Then it becomes a festival and it’s like at a soccer game in a stadium. The audience actually is very mixed. The standard participants are the founders of Google but then you also have the teachers who have been attending for ten years, for those people it is their annual intellectual vacation.
I think we actually found a good balance between physical access limitations and free online content. The online TED talks are becoming an incredible source for teachers who select speeches and give them to the students, or even for managers. I know of managers who actually show the speeches to their staff saying «Watch this and then next week we talk about it!» There are people who get inspired by the talks and start creating small TEDs within their company.
You used to blog almost daily at Lunch over IP but your have reduced posting to a minimum. Why?
During the last 6 to 10 month or so we have entered in a turn. I have slowed down my blogging and so have others. The same phenomenon is happening in social networking. I know a lot of people how barely keep up with their Facebook account or who have deleted their Xing or LinkedIn account. I think we are getting to a point where there is just too much! I think that many of those who are highly connected are increasingly having the feeling that they are less and less in control of their own time because part of their own time is actually decided and defined by what others do online.
In my view, we are facing a phenomenon of «innovation overload» on the web. There is too much innovation and part of them is totally insignificant in the great scheme of things. At conferences people usually come up to me and say, «Can I show you my new website, I am launching next week», and often I say to people, «Why should I come to your website exactly, what do you offer that users don’t already get?» Mostly they don’t have an answer. Or the answer is, «It’s cool, it’s new», you know, you can take a picture and put in a cartoon character and send it to your friend». Yes, so who cares? [laughing].
It reminds me of the historian Peter Watson’s words when he says that innovation has become the quest for the new rather than the quest for the radically new and that we are actually living in boring times terms of great ideas and real innovation.
This is partially true when it comes to innovation on the Internet which was fantastically exciting 15 years. But in terms of impact and social change, I think that we are actually living a period of very important changes. And despite the easy availability of information many people are just ignoring it. Particularly young people just go on with their lives without connecting at any level with the bigger scheme of society: political engagement, social engagement and so on.
Somebody this morning mentioned the big consequences of small events, the butterfly effect. Look at the changes brought forward in the last year by the increase of the oil price. In 18 months we went from 50 to 150 Dollars and suddenly we completely switch the discussion. The discussion before that was: European and American companies are exporting jobs to China. And now those jobs are coming back because it is too expensive to bring back the products from China, so you bring back the work and produce locally. If oil continues to go up, which I think over the long term will, that means that producing locally will become a value. That will transform the geography and the economics of trade. So an element like this comes along, which if you analyse it closely might have been predictable, and transforms reality. And then there are many other elements which have to do with social issues and cultural issues. The integration of Muslims in Europe right now is another issue that can totally transform a balance in society for example.
Somebody told me the other day – and I never thought of that in that way but it is totally scary – that if you close a little bit the supply of oil and you close a little bit the supply of clean water, our society may crumble. We may go back to a Mad Max scenario which is close to barbarism, right. I know, we are looking for technology solutions for that. But clearly, building a system on one single element, is putting all your eggs in one basket, and that is what we have been doing for almost 100 years. And that’s why I do not think that we are living in boring times, I think we are living in a time that where we are starting a gigantic transformation, not only pushed by that, pushed by many other factors.
Given the current global panorama and its challenges how do idea conferences have to be designed?
From my perspective, right now the most interesting field to be is where you try to bring together knowledge from fields that don’t necessarily cross: scientists from very different fields, multidisciplinary things, cross-pollination platforms. My sense is that the real solutions may come from this lateral approach, a doctor seeing something that has been done by a physicist somewhere else and capturing this idea, saying, «Oh, I could apply it here and transform this». That’s a very interesting place to be for us as conference organizers but I think this is also where the discussion should be on the public level.
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