Sparking ideas provide the key to TEDxMidland's success

When Chris Moultrup and his team from the Midland-based MidMichigan Innovation Center started making plans for TEDxMidland, coming Saturday, Jan. 28, to the Midland Center for the Arts, they saw it as a creative meet-and-great. “We wanted to introduce TED — technology, entertainment, design — to the market,” the center’s program director said of the non-profit creative think tank. But with its 100 tickets nearly gone, he said, it appears that the concept of sparking ideas through thought-provoking presentations and the resulting discussions is already a hit in Midland. Richard Saul Wurman held the first TED conference in 1984 in Monterey, Calif., demonstrating the Sony compact disc and 3D graphics from Lucasfilm, along with a new way to map coastlines through newly discovered fractals. But it was a financial failure, and Wurman and his partner Harry Marks didn’t hold another one for six years.

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