On April 23, 2015, the Disruptor Foundation and a breathtaking array of collaborators were invited as honored guests for the closing bell ceremony at the NASDAQ headquarters in Times Square. It was an acknowledgment of the spirit of innovation and the NASDAQ ethos embodied in the first ever Anti-Summit whose tent pole events were the sixth annual Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Awards (aka Disruptor AwardsSM) and the introduction of a new concept: the Do TankSM.
According to the University of Pennsylvania’s Think Tank that studies Think Tanks (seriously) the Disruptor Foundation under the watchful eye of our co-founder, spiritual leader and intellectual compass (not to mention the world’s foremost business thinker, Harvard Business School’s Professor Clayton Christensen, father of Disruptive Innovation Theory). We were was launching a new kind of event with a lot of help from our friends: The Anti-Summit and it’s centerpiece the first ever DO TANK (or what turned out to be 26 individual DO TANKS covering an broad swath of problems, local, national and global. The event was held in conjunction with the sixth annual Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Awards (aka Disruptor Awards) that embraced the ever-changing theory Christensen searching for anomalies his orignal theory could not explain. The ceremony is beamed out in high resolution to the countless visitors at the “center of the universe” while simultaneously broadcast around the globe. at NASDAQ. as the tentpole event for the first ever Anti-Summit was the perfect setting for the shifting role and redistribution of power from the center to the periphery. We had invited from our large community 500 fellows, 200 plus honorees, academics, culturistas, entrepreneurs- well-known and unknown to prototype a new type of approach to solving some of society’s most vexing problems. With a slate of 26 Do Tanks composed somewhat in the spirit of Foo Camp and a string of pickup basketball games. It was the harbinger of bringing in a whole new approach to problem-solving which focused more on problem defining than coming up with policies and solutions