Recently I joined a few Peopledesign people and approximately 600 other folks for Grand Rapids’ first TEDx event. The independently organized daylong innovation-themed seminar/networking event proved to be an excellent way to spend a spring day.

On the good advice of Sheryl Connelly, veteran attendee of past TED events and the day’s first speaker, I took thorough notes during all the presentations. (Connelly actually recommends that TED attendees try their best to take verbatim notes in order to break out of the human tendency of only writing down ideas that confirm our own beliefs.) Here are some of the ideas from the pages of my Moleskine that I thought were worth sharing…

Innovate Uncertainty, Sheryl Connelly
Ford Motor Company’s in-house futurist offered some practical tools for embracing uncertainty. Avoidance wasn’t one of them. After all, if you don’t make time to think about the future, as Connelly said, you are almost guaranteed a future of chance instead of a future of choice.

Innovate Ultra-Rapid Renewables, Sam Harrington
The young mechanical engineer behind Ecovative Design’s automated EcoCradle packaging manufacturing/growing system (which is already being used across town from us at Steelcase) redefined the concept of “waste” as “the most dangerous human invention of all time.” His solution? Look to nature for insights that could lead to new and unconventional solutions.

Innovate Innovation, Gabor George Burt
Blue Ocean Strategy expert Gabor George Burt encouraged attendees to allow innovation to enhance and seamlessly integrate with our lives. There is no such thing as a perfectly satisfied audience, he pointed out. Because infatuation by its very nature wears off, organizations have an opportunity to continually re-infatuate their audience.

Innovate Education, Mickey McManus
MAYA Design Inc. president, CEO and principal Mickey McManus offered some interesting validation of our method via his talk, which asked the important question: Should design literacy be relegated to MBAs and CEOs? Today technology allows us to make almost anything. Tomorrow will require creativity to ensure we make the right things.

Innovate Art, Jeffrey Kimpton
Thanks to a blown breaker in the Grand Rapids Civic Theatre, which disabled both his slide show and his teleprompter, Interlochen Center for the Arts president Jeffrey Klimpton had to speak without notes about his topic: the deep link between innovation and arts education. He didn’t miss a beat. From Jeffrey’s perspective, even though we have greater access to the arts in the U.S. today than at any other time in our history, we seem to be devaluing the arts more and more.

Innovate Curation, Steve Rosenbaum
Producer and documentary filmmaker-turned-Internet content curator Steve Rosenbaum made the case for more thoughtful filters in a world that’s rapidly filling up with content creators (“content creators” being another way of saying every cat owner with Flip cam). He shared some amazing stats about the exponential rate at which we’ve been creating bytes since the dawn of the Internet, as well as some hope that we are transitioning from the era of the “Me” Web to the era of the “We” Web.

Innovate Entrepreneurism, Christina Keller
An international expert on sustainable business (who also happens to reside right here in West Michigan), Christina heads the Triple Quest Business Unit at Cascade Engineering. She spoke about the need for NPOs to empower those they aim to help through education and other truly sustainable solutions.

Innovate Justice, Layli Miller-Muro
A culture should reflect all the voices who make up that culture, not just the loudest ones, Layli said. She’s the executive director of the Tahirih Justice Center, a non-profit organization that provides legal aid and public policy advocacy for women and girls facing human rights abuses. Through moving examples, her talk underscored the fact that the subjugation of women is not a women’s issue, it’s a global problem causing imbalance across humanity.

Innovate Your City, Carol Coletta
During ArtPrize 2009 in front of a smaller Grand Rapids audience, the president and CEO of CEOs for Cities gave a looser version of this talk, which explored the growing preference in the U.S. of young adults toward living within the “close-in” neighborhoods of our cities. Her reasons for this trend? Cities enable connection, innovation and success. Wages and productivity within communities increase with population density. And for a place to be truly vibrant, you need to make it possible for people to “stumble onto the fun.”

Innovate Philanthropy, Salah Boukadoum
Salah’s Good Returns model allows investors to redirect investment profits for one year in social projects before they get their return. “Corporations are incredibly powerful at solving problems,” Salah said. “They just don’t spend much time thinking about which problems are the most important to solve.” Collectively, models like Good Returns have the potential to make significant global change.

Innovate Clean Revolution, Amy Davidsen
Amy is the U.S. executive director of The Climate Group. She spoke with the passion of a parent about the ecological problems facing our environment. According to her statistics, we have the technology to eliminate 70 percent of all harmful emissions in the foreseeable future, but energy innovation is constantly being beaten back. “When did we get the idea that a cleaner planet would result in a lower quality of life?” she asked. 

Innovate Wonder, Robert Fuller
Professor of Religious Studies at Bradley University, Robert Fuller wants all of us to live in a state of wonder every day. “A life shaped by wonder is much different than a life shaped by fear or guilt,” he said. Curt gave his talk a two-point deduction because he opened it with a dictionary definition.

Innovate Experience, Michael Strong
“How can everyone on Earth be happy and fulfilled?” asked Michael Strong, co-founder (with John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market) and Chief Visionary Officer of Conscious Capitalism, Inc. Michael looked at the three primary sources of happiness (flow, meaning/purpose, and simple pleasure) and encouraged attendees to take the initiative to live creatively and do things that use the best of ourselves.

In the spirit of TED, I encourage everyone to explore these ideas for yourself. All of the TEDx Grand Rapids talks, along with hundreds of other inspirational videos, will be made available online on the TEDx YouTube channel. Between that and TED.com, you’re certain to find dozens of ideas that inspire you, and to imagine ways to carry those ideas forward through your community.