The Tenth Annual Bigelow Forum was held on Thursday, September 21 and Friday, September 22 at the Wentworth by the Sea in New Castle, NH.
This year’s theme, A Pivot to the Future, allowed us to embark on a thought-provoking journey to explore our exponentially-changing technological world and how it impacts us, our businesses, our families, our institutions, and our communities.
Rob MacLeod, Bigelow Managing Director, kicked off Thursday afternoon with a brief reflection on our past 10 years at the Bigelow Forum, highlighting favorite moments, speakers, topics discussed, and IP we co-created as a community. Several participants shared their learnings from past Forums. One participant indicated that her experiences at the Bigelow Forum have resulted in “better outcomes, more intelligently delivered.”
Following Rob’s welcome, David Linton, Managing Director, discussed the journey of an EOM. David presented the newly extended Life Arc of an Entrepreneur Owner-Manager, which focuses on how reinvention and philanthropy can create a Virtuous Cycle of entrepreneurship. He then introduced Bigelow’s new Positive Legacy Film Series and showcased our first two films featuring the stories and journeys of Irv Robinson (Robbie Manufacturing, Inc.) and Jan Blomstrann (NRG Systems, Inc.).
Jan Blomstrann, the former CEO of NRG Systems, joined David live to further discuss her narrative and answer various questions from Forum participants.
We kicked off Friday with our featured speaker, Dr. Peter H. Diamandis. He is the Founder & Executive Chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation and Co-Founder & Executive Chairman of Singularity University. Diamandis gave a lively and eye-opening discussion about exponentially growing technologies, specifically highlighting their ability to transform industries and solve humanity’s grand challenges. In this exponentially-changing world, we learned that it is not enough to do 10% better — we must do 10 times better. How can we, in any aspect of our life, find our 10x motivation and create that change?
Following his speech, Peter Worrell, Managing Director, interviewed Peter Diamandis live. Listen to the interview now.
Friday concluded with Forum participants engaging in hands-on, live demonstrations of tomorrow’s technology. These technologies included: augmented reality, presented by Create/AR (San Mateo, CA); autonomous vehicles, presented by Tesla of Boston; robotics, presented through Beam technology by Suitable Technologies (Palo Alto, CA); 3D printing, presented by MIT CSAIL; and drones, presented by UAV America.