Architect David Rockwell speaks at the annual Collaborative Innovation Summit, held last week in Providence. The summit brings together business people, educators and government officials.

The Providence Journal / Frieda Squires

PROVIDENCE — The people visiting The Lederer Theater at midweek were a well-behaved bunch.

Dressed mostly in business-casual clothing, they chatted calmly amongst themselves, didn’t jostle each other on their way to the buffet and picked up after themselves — behavior that belied the general reputation the 100 or so people have for being rabble-rousers of one sort or another.

“What I sense in all of these companies is a disruptive point of view,” said William Taylor, author and cofounder of Fast Company magazine. “You can shake up a field, you can shake up an industry [and] you can shake up a company.”

All the more reason for this group to gather in downtown Providence for the annual Collaborative Innovation Summit.

The summit, now in its fourth year, is designed as a catalyst to get business people, educators and government officials working together to come up with new ways of doing business in Rhode Island. Held at The Lederer Theater, the two-day summit is run by the Business Innovation Factory, an affiliate of the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation.

“The power of small groups and small rooms is not to be forgotten,” Curt Columbus, artistic director of Trinity Repertory Company, told the audience as he stood onstage at the theater on Washington Street.

Through PowerPoint presentations, video snippets, personal anecdotes and the occasional show-and-tell, people related the stories of how they came about a new business concept, well-received community-building effort or trailblazing academic inquiry.

Columbus and other summit speakers talked about risk-taking, about creating business organizations that allow for creative thinking and about on-the-fly problem solving.

Many described innovation not as policy to be completed and filed away, but as an evolving approach to discovering unmet business or social needs and developing ways to address them.

“BIF remains the Lake Wobegon of conferences,” said Taylor, who served as summit moderator, “every presenter is above average.”

Past participants have included executives from consumer-products giant Proctor & Gamble, toymaker Mattel, computer-industry stalwart IBM and NBA franchise Dallas Mavericks, among others.

Among the Rhode Island people who have spoken at the conference are: Dennis Littky, the cofounder of The Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center in Providence; Providence Police Chief Dean Esserman; Andries van Dam, a Brown University researcher; and Clay Rockefeller, cofounder of The Steel Yard — a nonprofit arts/technical training program in Providence.

Besides Columbus, this year’s participants included: Best Buy advertising executives Steven Bendt and Gary Koelling; Debi Brooks, cofounder of the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Disease; Lewis Gordon Pugh, an Arctic explorer and environmentalist; architect David Rockwell; and Alexander Tsiaras, whose studies of the human body may make him a modern-day Michelangelo.

Tsiaras created Anatomical Travelogue, a media company that explains health-care issues in television, books and online. His company’s interactive Web site, VisualMD, is to launch in February. Its intent is to encourage people who visit the free site to take care of their health.

“What we’re trying to do with this Web site is give you that epiphany,” said the software developer and Greek immigrant. “As you can see, it’s the typical career path for the Macedonian goat herder.”

The pair of presenters from Best Buy told the story of how they used technology to help coworkers share ideas and make their company a better place to work.

Bendt and Koelling described creating Blue Shirt Nation, a social-networking Web site that allows company workers to share information, complaints and suggestions. About 13 percent of the company’s 150,000 workers contribute to the site, the two said.

“It’s a mix of YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn,” said Bendt, who is involved with marketing at the electronics retailer. “It’s kind of a fluke that it all came together.”

Initially, Bendt and Koelling said, they got little support from higher-ups in the company for their idea, and when it was presented to a group of workers, they trashed the idea.

Instead of giving up, they took the group bowling, the pair said. Over the clatter and crash of bowling pins and ball-retrieval chutes, the group suggested ways to improve the idea.

“That was probably the best gift that we got,” Bendt said. “That was the only thing that was going to make this thing work. They had to want to use it.”

The company benefits from the site, the founders said, because executives find out what’s on the minds of employees who are among the most loyal workers.

When they complained about plans to scrap the employee-discount program, executives shelved the idea.

When employees asked for e-mail accounts, the company set them up for full-time workers.

When the company wanted to boost enrollment in its 401(k) program, Best Buy hosted a video contest on Blue Shirt Nation that raised enrollment 30 percent.

When employees suggested taking part in disaster-relief efforts, the company decided to create Blue Shirt Corps — an on-call unit still in its formative stages.

“What’s really happened is a change has taken place,” Koelling said. “[Executives] discovered the price of trust versus the price of power. The culture has been changed by the releasing of these voices.”

Another storyteller, Tony Hsieh, said company culture was the first priority when he joined Zappos.com, a popular shoe-retailing Web site.

The boyish-looking technology veteran put money into Zappos in the summer of 1999, just months after the company started.

“We really want the Zappos brand to be more than just selling shoes,” Hsieh said. “We want it to be the very best customer service.”

New workers get a thick paperbound book that explains the company’s philosophy for how to treat customers, coworkers and suppliers.

The workers undergo a four-week training period, spending two weeks handling customer phone calls and working a week inside a warehouse before they are made permanent.

People who don’t look as if they’ll fit in are offered a $2,000 buyout after the first week, Hsieh said.

“We will actively fire people if they’re bad for the culture,” he added.

That included a new senior executive at the 1,600-person company who thought customer service calls were beneath him, Hsieh said.

“Our number-one priority is company culture,” he said. “If you get company culture right, most of the other stuff will just happen on its own.”

The culture of the state’s community is the priority for the Business Innovation Factory and its founder, Saul Kaplan, executive director of the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation.

“Community is central to everything we do,” states the BIF summit handbook.

And creating a community willing to experiment in business, education and public service is the goal.

“Rhode Island’s compact geography and densely connected networks make it the ideal place to explore and test new networked business models,” Kaplan said.

pgrimald@projo.com