(Follow all of MIT Sloan Management Review’s coverage of TED.)

Where do new management ideas come from? At TED, they come from the most surprising sources. For example, yesterday there was a brief presentation (from the Palm Springs simulcast) by comic and actress Christen Sussin, who shared her four rules of improvisation:

1. Say yes to everything.
2. Follow and see where it goes.
3. Make eye contact.
4. Choose what you want to know.

She’s clearly talking about comedic improvisation, but at least some of those lessons seem to apply to management improvisation as well. And her first rule, about being open to everything, seems to be one of the best ways to generate new management ideas, too.

While it’s probably not healthy to consider everything in your life as the source of a new management idea, it’s fascinating how so many of the talks here have management implications if you consider them in a certain way. Architect Daniel Libeskind talked about how he tried to make his work expressive rather than neutral, unexpected rather than habitual, memorable rather than forgettable, communicative rather than mute, democratic rather than authoritarian. And Rosamund Zander, reading from an upcoming book about personal fulfillment, delivered some rules — “take responsibility for everything,” “embrace different patterns” — that are just as applicable in the office as at home.

The day’s talked ranged from Evan Williams (that’s him to the right) telling the story of Twitter (so far) to Evan Schwartz revealing a mystery behind The Wizard of Oz; Jennifer Mather revealing the intelligence the octopus to an unveiling (by yet another member of the MIT Media Lab) of a fascinating new children’s toy. More on all that later (the first morning session begins shortly). Sustainability has been an enormous theme at this year’s TED; we’ll be covering some of those talks on MIT Sloan Management Review’s Beyond Green blog.

The day ended, of course, with a lavish party. You know it’s going to be a good party when you’re met at the front door by a flowered rendering of a large green elephant.

That’s all for now. I’m about to step into a panel on a topic we covered in the most recent print issue of the magazine: predicting (see What People Want and How To Predict It and The Prediction Lover’s Handbook). I’ll report tonight.

Follow all of MIT Sloan Management Review’s coverage of TED.

Someone doing a study of collaborative innovation could start with a look at the TED Prize, three of which were awarded here last night. The winners this year were extraterrestrial life searcher Jill Tarter, ocean researcher Sylvia Earle, and economist, musician, and advocate Jose Antonio Abreu. The idea is that the prize winners announce their dream. TED kicks in $100,000 to start funding that dream. More important, the prize winner now has access to the people in the TED community. Immediately after the acceptance speeches and into today, I’ve seen dozens of TED luminaries pledge in-kind support to the dream of one winner or another.

This stone soup approach isn’t uncommon, but it’s particularly impressive because all these people are at the center of other communities and have much to offer: that’s how they wound up at TED. Indeed, previous winners of the TED prize have had their dreams fulfilled because of intervention and assistance from (that word again) TEDsters. The most high-profile example of that is photojournalist Jim Nachtwey, a 2007 prize winner, who had to surmount multiple political and technical hurdles to tell his story of a deadly disease that’s hidden to most people in the developed world. Contacts at TED helped him do that.

The TED Prize ceremony capped a day in which it was definitely technology, the “T” in TED, held sway. Some of it was about robots. We learned about medical robots that permit minimally invasive surgery and biologist Robert Full revealed what he learned about how tails work while building robots that mimic geckos.

The first day there was plenty of talk about robots, too, and some of the breakthroughs demonstrated on the TED stage have been placed in the lobby so attendees can get a closer look. You can, for example, interact with a realistic Albert Einstein head that changes its facial expression based on yours:

Yesterday’s talk from Shai Agassi, who, like so many other TED speakers, began his talk with a provocative question — “How would you run a country without oil?” — and told the story of his journey to build an electric car. He noted that “electric cars have to be more convenient and more affordable than what they’re replacing” and maintained that the way to do this is to “separate ownership of the car and ownership of the battery” and replace it with a business model in which people and companies “own the car but subscribe to miles.” When explaining why he decided on an all-electric car rather than a hybrid, he got off the line of the day when he quoted Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn, who’s one of many funding Agassi’s international effort:

Hybrids are like mermaids. When you want a fish, you have a woman. When you want a woman, you have a fish.

You can learn more about Agassi’s company, Better Place, which he’s using to develop — you guessed right — a community around his endeavor.

And, finally, there was a big storm yesterday in Long Beach, as you can see:

This is our second daily post covering this week’s TED conference. You can follow all our TED coverage.

For a conference that’s supposed to be about long-term ideas, those ideas sure get spread at record speed. Thanks to blogs and especially Twitter, reports from the first day of this year’s TED conference (here’s a TED primer for managers, if you need one) began flowing within seconds after a speaker noted something particularly noteworthy. As I write this post before dawn the following morning, I see that there is plenty of good, almost-instant coverage, particularly from Ethan Zuckerman, BoingBoing, and the official TED blog. Rather than deliver a blow-by-blow list of everything that happens, which can get tedious quickly and allows for hardly any reflection, the idea here is to identify the most important parts of the long day and night (with 48 speakers or performers, events started at 8:30 a.m. and ran past 11 p.m. — and that’s just the official events) and give a sense of what it is like to be here.

The two stars of the big morning session were Juan Enriquezand Bill Gates. Enriquez is the sort of polymath made for a diverse conference like TED: he’s done everything from run the Life Sciences Project at Harvard Business School to serve as a member of the peace commission in Mexico that negotiated the cease-fire in Chiapas’ Zapatista rebellion. He’s best-known, perhaps, as a presenter: I’ve witnessed him speak engagingly on everything from why schools in the Arabic world used to be the best in the planet but aren’t anymore to why being knowledgeable about genetics is just as important as being digitally literate.

Back in October, just as the political and business leaders were starting to understand the ramifications of the financial crisis, Enriquez delivered a raw, whirlwind presentation at the Pop!Tech conference that focused on what the then-yet-to-be-elected new president needed to do, with an emphasis on austerity. I don’t know how long it will be until Enriquez’s talk yesterday is posted to TED.com, but those who want a taste of it can see an earlier iteration from Pop!Tech:

Juan Enriquez (2008) Pop!Tech Pop!Cast from PopTech on Vimeo.

Enriquez started his talk and the conference by jumping straight into the economy. TED is 25 years old this year, and Enriquez was the first of many speakers the first day to couch his analysis in terms of a 25-year cycle. He’s updated the talk substantially since its October debut; its tone is now more optimistic than its shell-shocked counterpart at Pop!Tech, with a persuasive argument that, in the long term, technology is more powerful than the current financial catastrophe. He identified our ability to engineer cells, tissues, and robots as the economic engines that will outlast the downturn. Among his most compelling examples was a realistic robot from Boston Dynamics that comes astonishingly close to moving like a human:

In a later presentation, coincidentally, another speaker cited the same robot in a talk about the future of war: most technology is neither inherently good nor evil. It’s all in how it’s used.

Bill Gates needs no introduction: he’s the most successful capitalist and philanthropist of his time. And, in keeping with the theme of the event, he stated “I am an optimist” (why shouldn’t he be?) and spoke fluently and passionately about two of the big questions his foundation is trying to answer: how do you stop deadly diseases spread by mosquitos?” and “how do you make a teacher great?” He spoke with both anger (”there’s more money put into treating baldness than malaria”) and disbelief (in some school districts, teacher contracts require that a principal can only enter a classroom once a year, with advance notice). But the blogosphere and twittersphere (there has to be a better word than this) were, er, buzzing with a stunt Gates pulled while discussing malaria, the deadly disease spread by mosquitos:

“Not only poor people should experience this,” Gates said as he opened the jar and let a pair of (malaria-free) mosquitoes into the room. Several prominent blogs referred to Gates “unleashing a swarm of mosquitoes on his audience” but I don’t think two counts as a swarm. The move did lead TED curator Chris Anderson, who’s got a background in publishing, to crack that a good headline for the talk would be “Bill Gates Releases More Bugs Into the World.” Anderson also said that Gates’s talk will be posted to the TED website later today. We’ll point to it.

The pick of the afternoon sessions included talks by co-chairman of Infosys, Nandan Nilekani, filmmaker Jake Eberts, MIT’s own Pattie Maes, and Interface CEO Ray Anderson. The morning sessions start soon, after a breakfast appointment, so for now let me offer some highlights (more detail coming later in the day):

• Nandan Nilekani spoke about his upcoming book, Imagining India, in which he endeavors to consider the wild disparities of India in terms of four types of ideas: ideas that have arrived, ideas in progress, ideas in conflict, and ideas in anticipation.
• Filmmaker Jake Eberts showed a nine-minute rough set of excerpts from Oceans, a new film from the team that made Winged Migration about the underwater world. It was jaw-droppingly beautiful and earned a standing ovation for its thrilling shots of jumping whales, forests of jellyfish, and (apparently) friendly sharks. There’s no link available yet for the video; the film isn’t coming out in the U.S. until April 2010.
• Pattie Maes, who runs the Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab, showed off an early version of “Where Ur World,” a multitouch system developed with Pranav Mistry that seeks to combine online information with real-world interaction in surprising ways. The example that left the audience smiling was one in which Pranav shook hands with someone and a tag cloud relating to that person was projected onto that person’s shirt. The website for the project is still under construction.
• Almost-president Al Gore offered an update of his Inconvenient Truth talk (summary: things are getting worse), but more compelling was Ray Anderson, founder and chairman of Interface, who spoke of how he’s turning the world’s largest manufacturer of modular carpet into a model of sustainability. Anderson had plenty of useful nuts-and-bolts information about how companies should think about sustainability, which we’ll spell out later, but his money quote came from Amory Lovins: “If something exists, it must be possible.”

The sun is up, the day is beginning. I have much more to pass on about Day 1 of TED (yes, I waited on line for food with stars; yes, the Long Beach experience is different from Monterey) and I will as the day progresses. But right now I’m interested in learning more from Ray Anderson, which is why I’m signing off and going to interview him.

Much more to come …

(Housekeeping note: someone has asked what the “#TED” in the headline means. It’s a hash tag, intended to make it easier for people to search for, in this case, blog and Twitter posts about TED.)

This week, MIT Sloan Management Review is in Long Beach, Calif., for this year’s TED conference, which starts tomorrow. We’ll report daily. Now in its 25th year, TED remains an unclassifiable event. The letters of the name originally stood for technology, entertainment, and design, but in recent years the tag line for the event has become “ideas worth spreading.”

The event is certainly an elitist one. It’s expensive, hard to get into, and you’re just as likely to bump into web inventor Tim Berners-Lee as Overboard star Goldie Hawn in the food lines. If nothing else, TED is a trip. The veteran conference (this reporter has been to six of them) has gone through many permutations. Under curator Chris Anderson, TED is still full of technology, entertainment, and design, but it has really lived up to the change-the-world rhetoric that was always a bit more under the surface during Richard Saul Wurman’s ace stewardship. One high-profile example: Al Gore’s warning about global warming turned into An Inconvenient Truth after a movie producer saw him deliver the talk at TED. Last year E.O. Wilson debuted here the first iteration of his Encyclopedia of Life, funded by a TED grant.

The change-the-world attitude gets a bit out of hand: there’s plenty of talk about how for the past two years the gift bags, by Rickshaw Bagworks, have been constructed from 100-percent post-consumer recycled beverage bottles, but hardly anyone points out that the bags are overstuffed with non-essential items that have a much greater impact on the environment. Indeed, TED is a place for conspicuous consumption, even if it’s relatively sustainable consumption; it’s the only conference I’ve been to in which I’ve seen anyone drive up in a Tesla. (I’ve seen two today here as well as an even more cutting-edge vehicle.) Those with similar ambitions to TED’s, but a more limited budget, may wish to consider attending the alt-TED BIL, which is also in Long Beach this week (and which I hope to visit while I’m here).

For many years, TED was held in Monterey, Calif., but success has brought it to a larger venue farther south, in Long Beach (there’s a smaller, parallel, event being held east of here, in Palm Springs). At Monterey, most of the conference took place in one area. Here, with banners everywhere and events more spread out, it feels like the event has taken over the town, like Sundance does in Park City, South by Southwest does in Austin, and Davos (aka the World Economic Forum) does in, well, Davos. We’ll see how that works.

Indeed, just like last year, TED is coming right after Davos, which was a downer and inspired anger from even sober-minded management thinkers. Last year, TED presenter Craig Venter contrasted the optimism of TED with the pessimism of Davos. This year, especially, we could use a little optimism.

Especially if that optimism is realistic. Except for its entertainers, TED is an irony-free zone, a place where earnest speakers talk about fixing the world as if it is not merely possible, but mandatory. As we’ll see during the conference, the speakers here have a pretty good track record at improving one or another part of the world. The theme for this year’s event is “The Great Unveiling,” which refers in part to the conference’s new location, but also to new ideas due to be debuted here.

So why should managers care what’s happening here? Because the best new ideas helps make good managers better. The joke among TEDsters (an annoying term, yes, but it has stuck) is that attending the conference is an endurance sport. It’s one thing to be in a room listening to spectacular insights for a few hours. It’s another to be doing so for half a week. Nonetheless, part of the experience you get from being at events like TED is that feeling of being overwhelmed: someone just said what feels like the smartest thing you ever heard — and then the next speaker says what feels like the smartest thing you ever heard — and then … well, you get the idea. It’s intellectually exhausting, but it’s also thrilling. And, during the best talks, you can’t help thinking: How can I act on this?