Welcome to the Progressive Ideas project!

Greetings from Palm Springs!

As many of you who have already been participating on the project’s Facebook page know, the Progressive Ideas project has a BIG question for this week at TEDActive: How do we bring a great idea to scale? It’s a question that matters to all of us in the TED community, to anyone who has a seed of an idea they’d like to see come to life in the world and impact people’s lives for the better. To all of you ideators, creators, entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, designers, makers, builders, doers – I hope you’ll join us as we explore ways to cultivate great ideas and help them grow.

From the discussion so far, there are already some provocative questions emerging for the week…

* What kinds of ideas are most likely to stick and scale?
* What kinds of people, resources, and environments can help to nurture great ideas?
* What are the stages ideas need to go through in getting to scale?
* How can we use networks and communities to help ideas gain momentum?
* What does meaningful progress look like? Is it better to “go viral” or to scale by “small steps”?

Heady stuff! And we’re excited to dive in with you.

Which reminds me that I should introduce you to the team. I’m Ingrid Fetell, and I work at IDEO – a global design and innovation consultancy focused on creating impact through design. I’ll be facilitating our discussion this week. You can find me here and at @ingridfetell on Twitter. I’m joined by Jen Indovina (@jenindo) as storyteller and Farrah Bostic (@farrahbostic) as amplifier. We’ll be posting here and on the Facebook page all week, and tweeting to let you know about impromptu activities and conversations going on around the Riviera. Stop by our project space in the DCC between talks tomorrow, and use the hashtag #ActiveIdeas to share your ideas online. That last bit about the hashtags goes double for those of you not in Palm Springs this week, so you can join us from afar (and we hope you will)!

It’s going to be a great week!

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