Upon arriving at Media X, Levy quickly realized that "the university" was a complex ecosystem and not a single entity. For outside businesses, interacting with the university in a manner that was beneficial to their goals was not always a simple task. Levy realized that the key to getting things moving in the right direction was to ask good questions.

She decided that Stanford needed a virtual reorganization around ideas (which was plausible, where a structural reorganization was not). Using common tools of engagement (requests for proposals, graduate student funding, focus days, conferences, and meetings and correspondence, Levy was able to build the Media X program to a peak of 25 partner companies with a minimum investment of $50,000 in the university. Twice she had to close the door to new companies because they had all they could handle. Her biggest innovation was that you have to ask the right questions to get the ball rolling.

Of course, Levy said, it's all about ROI. But ROI doesn't mean the same thing to everyone involved and has to be translated accordingly. For businesses, it means return on investment, for universities in means research of interest, and for the government it means results of importance. For everyone, the bottom line is: what can we get out of this?

Levy left the audience at the BIF-3 conference, with three guiding principles the she learned from her experience at Stanford:

1. Start with good questions. The question, said Levy, is the universal language.
2. Relationships over transactions. Translate why people should be at the table together.
3. Sufficient metrics don't yet exist to measure what you get out of the network effect (which says that every time to add someone to your network, everyone in the network benefits).

This experience stuck with Semple, who 7 or 8 years ago launched talk.gateway, an online, internal social networking platform for the 30,000 employees of the British Broadcasting Company (BBC). Today, 23,000 BBC employees talk on the talk.gateway forums, 5,000 are using wikis to collaborate on projects, and 4-500 are blogging. Bringing social networking to the BBC seemed like the inevitable thing to do, says Semple, recalling the early days of the project.

Erica Driver from Forrester Research has an excellent post about Semple where she identifies 4 lessons learned from enterprise web 2.0 adoption at the BBC. Briefly (I'm paraphrasing):

• Enterprise web 2.0 can encourage collaboration.
• Start small and define ownership clearly. (At the BCC, their system was owned by everyone.)
• Trust your users and they'll trust you (and each other).
• Push your comfort boundaries.

I think Semple best sums up the lesson to be learned from his experience at the BBC in a quote from the bio distributed to conference goers, "If you make systems too serious or too business-like, people won’t use them. But, as a consequence of blogs and networks, it is possible to connect your brightest and best people with each other and with their organizations. Business is based on relationships, and this way you actually talk to the people you want to talk to."

Dan Heath, who co-authored the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die with his brother Chip, started his talk at BIF-3 this afternoon by asking the audience to complete the exercise I described above. A good number (perhaps nearly half) of audience members were able to name more white things the second time around. But that's an odd outcome, said Heath, because there are more white things that exist in the universe than in your refrigerator. The constraint, however, helped focus your thinking and made the task of identifying objects easier because of the stricter perameters.

Improv actors, said Heath, have long utilized the benefits of inside the box thinking. Improvisation needs a clear catalyst, something to motivate the action, and for that reason improv actors are trained to be very specific with their dialogue. They don't say, "what's the matter?" they say, "are you still angry about that time I threw your necklace in the toilet?" The added constraints help them to jump into the scene and continue to be creative and riff off the idea.

Inside the box thinking is found all around business in the form of what Heath called a "high concept pitch." Example he gave are Jaws in space = Alien, Die Hard on a bus = Speed, and Blockbuster by mail = Netflix. These pitches are boxes that inform creative decisions down the line. For example, if you were the set designer for the movie Alien and needed to design a spaceship, looking at the type of thing that had already been done, you'd probably end up with something clean and futuristic like the sets seen on Star Trek. But since the pitch is "Jaws in space," that design aesthetic won't work. Jaws is gritty, frantic, and sweaty, which changes your perception.

The box can inform many decisions taking place throughout an organization. The concreteness and specificity of constraints aide in decision making, and the box can be a guide to thinking, an inspiration to thinking. But you have to find the right box, said Heath, who told a story about pitching one of his earlier businesses to venture capitalists and failing because he was stuck in the wrong box. He was pitching his product (online textbooks) as a product rather than pitching it as an investment, and not getting any bites from VCs as a result. In that case, being stuck in the wrong box was detrimental.

"The idea that we need to think out of the box is wrong," concluded Heath, "instead we should go box shopping. We need to try on as many boxes as possible."

The BIF-3 is structured so that in between blocks of short presentations by "storytellers," conference goers can get up and mingle and have a conversation about what they just heard. The first of the day's four sessions concluded with an interesting chat between 37Signals founder and CEO Jason Fried and Wall Street Journal technology columnist and blogger Walt Mossberg.

Mossberg began by saying they weren't going to be talking about technology, but it quickly became clear that he meant they weren't going to talk about technology from a technical standpoint. Instead, Mossberg focused on what Fried knows best: what makes technology good. Anyone who has read anything from 37Signals can guess Fried's answer: simplicity.

The reason, argued Jason, is that the software industry is structured to build crap (borrowing the term Mossberg used to describe Outlook). Software is designed to make money on new versions shipped every year or so, and in order to convince users to keep upgrading developers feel pressure to add new features. 37Signals, on the other hand, offers its software over the web as a service. When people are paying a monthly fee, the company can release updates on a continuous basis and focus on making things work as simply as possible, rather than adding more features.

Always the skeptic, Mossberg didn't buy it. How do you balance your mantra of simplicity with demands of self selected vocal customers who want more, he asked. How do you avoid feature creep?

Echoing a post he made on his company's blog this morning, Fried said that good software needs editors. The same way a museum needs a curator or a writer needs an editor, software development too demands a leader with a clear voice who is willing to say, "no." "You have to be a hard ass," said Fried. 37Signals is what Fried calls an "opinionated company." They believe in their way of doing things, and users who agree with those ideas will have a great time using their software. Another company built in this mold is Apple.

"But Steve Jobs is a dictator," said Mossberg of the comparison to Apple. "And I love that," said Fried. "I think it's unbelievably fantastic."

In their book Getting Real, 37Signals talks about making software for a core group of customers. "The customer is not always right," they write. "The truth is you have to sort out who's right and who's wrong for your app." The number one person who is right for you app is you, the developer. If you're not making software that you would use, and is built with your vision in mind, then the software will suffer because as a result. As Fried told the crowd here, "Fundamentally, people need to say no more."