The North American Council for Staff, Professional and Organizational Development is holding their annual conference right here in St. Paul, at the Crowne Plaza Riverfront. I had the pleasure of meeting a lot of these terrific folks last year, when NCSPOD held a joint conference with the POD Network in Higher Education, in Reno. (I've been a member of POD for about 15 years.) It's a great group of faculty and administrators, many of them with responsibility for both faculty and staff development.
I had the privilege of extending an informal welcome last night. Looks like about 150 members will be attending the conference this year. They've got a great program lined up, with our Senior Vice Chancellor Linda Baer introducing keynoter Joel Barker this morning, then tomorrow morning, Century College's Jermaine Davis will provide a keynote.
Barker's talk, just ended, provided an insightful and engaging look at "innovation at the verge." I took away a helpful definition of innovation as distinct from invention (innovators successfully implement!), and good ideas for fostering innovation not in the "center" of an organization, but out at the fringes, where the culture is verging on another culture/ecosystem/organization, etc.
Next year's NCSPOD conference will be in Vancouver, BC. I hope to present some of the innovative work we're planning at CTL to complete this year.
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