Bruno Giussani is the European director of TED and the curator of the annual TEDGlobal conference and of TED University. As a member of TED’s senior team, he participates in the definition of TED’s strategy and in the management of its activities and initiatives. He is also a well-known author (his articles have appeared in many media in Europe and the US, including the New York Times, the NZZ and the European editions of Wired, and he has authored several books) and an entrepreneur who has co-founded three Internet companies. He is a member of the Board of the Knight Fellowships at Stanford University. He is also the producer and host of the annual Forum des 100, organized in Lausanne by the magazine L’Hebdo. Previously, he was the Head of online strategy at the World Economic Forum. He is based in Switzerland.
Tell us the story of your latest project. What has been occupying you in the last 6 months?
The fast growth of TED globally. In the last 18 months we have launched the TEDx initiative and the TED Open Translation and TED Open TV Projects, and in the last six months they have all registered a spectacular growth. TEDx is now in 90 countries, led by amazing, committed, passionate groups of local organizers who surprise us every day for the quality of their events; the Open Translation Project has thousands of volunteer translators bringing TEDtalks to their communities in over 75 languages; the Open TV project has already 250 broadcasters signed up to use TEDtalks in their programming. And we just announced the move of TEDGlobal to Edinburgh (from our previous location in Oxford), and I’m working on the program of the 2011 conference. Ah, we also just launched a new TED iPad app and are about to announce the winner of the 2011 TEDPrize. It is busy, but fun.
Tell us more about the idea you’d like to talk about at TEDxZurich. Why is it important? What impact could it have?
I will try to use some of the things we do at TED to talk about a few mechanisms that can be used to help ideas travel far. I believe that ideas can have a real impact, but only if they are easily accessible, share-able, use-able. Author Matt Ridley says that progress happens when ideas meet and mate, when “ideas have sex”. So how can we help ideas meet and circulate and “have more sex”?