After months of planning, our team of five organizers, a handful of volunteers and our great speakers descended on the Mark Twain House in Hartford, CT for TEDxAsylumHill – The Art of Innovation. With generous donations of time and materials from many volunteers and a sponsorship from the Metro Hartford Alliance, we were able to host central Connecticut’s second TEDx event.
Through a variety of lenses, including education, entrepreneurship, strategy, design, and new media/publishing, we explored ways to think differently. Our venue for the event accommodated our audience of almost a hundred quite comfortably and Mark Twain’s history and environment of the museum reinforced the topic of the day.
Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.
— Mark Twain
Despite some technical difficulties (that required a brief intermission), we were able to project two previously recorded TED videos during the event:
Charles Leadbeater: The era of open innovation
And then, on the more humorous side for a change of pace:
Malcolm Gladwell: Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce
After an unfortunate last-minute back out of one speaker, the show had to go on with seven total speakers – five of whose videos can be seen below:
Overall, it was a great learning experience, opportunity to network, and push to get Hartford thinking for the better. I am looking forward to attending TEDxBushnellPark – Improving the Community and organizing another TEDx event in the future.
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