Hello - I am chairing/planning a Women's Conference (internally) at a
major microchip technology company in Oregon and am seeking advice for
sessions.

Our theme will be "leaping ahead" and "innovation" -but would love to
hear your ideas too.  Can you provide ideas about "innovation" in
terms of work life balance, women's issues at work, technology, career
planning, or anything else you can think of regarding sessions that
would be interesting for a one-day conference with this theme.

I've entertained the idea of bringing in a "futurist" as an outside
keynote (would love to hear more about this or get contacts of female
futurists who conduct keynotes at a reasonable price - ~10k or less).

Thank you!   Liberal tipper -- commensurate with response.

A friend of mine had great things to say after having attended a class
taught by Dr. Helen Harkness. Bet she'd make a great keynote speaker.

http://www.career-design.com/HH_more.html

This may be a little left field but you said you wanted something
different. Knowing that you are in the computer industry and knowing
that TETRIS is still the most popular game played by women, how about
organinzing your theme around; "Real Life Tetris - Making all the
pieces fit." I would try to have my keynote speaker talk about how to
proritize. (May I suggest you contact Monica Ricci") Then, after your
keynote speaker, you have breakout rooms where each of the topics you
have identified as important are discussed and some type of consensus
reached about how it fits into women's lives. Then you get back
together at the end of the day and use a visual illustration of the
Tetris game with the suggestions written into the  blocks and then
have a general discussion of the results. Good luck with your meeting!
P.S. I have only addressed the innovation in terms of life balance. I
would suggest that although having a "futurist" lecture is an
excellent idea, it is another day's work!

A key aspect with both innovation, leaping ahead and addressing the
work life balance is understanding the development process and
addressing time to market within the organisation.

In my experience too many companies have an ill defined process and
too many priorities. The result is that work then spills over into
home life. Whilst companies must be innovative to survive they must
also be quick and slick at the process of bringing them to market. Its
no good having a good idea that is the last one to market.

Men are often in the position where they can stay late at work and
take part in the that all important meeting which in reality achieves
very little. Women often have additional external committments
(whether the school run or pick up from the child minder) and can not
afford the time to dawdle. However the reality is, that most
organisations behave like a male organisation whereas they need to
change to a female attitude. The priorities need to be focussed on by
the whole organisation and the processes modified accordingly. The
focus of the organisation should be time to market. The
innovation/idea capture process can just be a bolt on part of this
process.

The innovative speakers are very good at telling you how to think
outside the box, generate new ideas or capture the voice of the
customer. However, once again in my opinion most companies are already
very good at generating the ideas or having some pool of ideas that
they can call on. The weak link in the chain is often how we decide
which ideas to work on? Which one first? How to divide resource? When
is it really required by? etc.

For a company to have an ideal process they need to have about 9
different building blocks that are key to the process. This starts
with things like Voice of the Customer and goes on to cover aspects
like the "development process". I could probably go on and talk about
this all day so I will not bore you any more. If you want to discuss
more outside of this forum let me know.

Women in communication are using hitech such as PowerPoint and
Photoshop to beef up their presentations.   Guess they are the new
"infoworkers".

I see power point with morphing from prehistoric grasshopper into
sci-fi grosshopper machine that leaps across the city in block size
jumps.Then a woman is showing she is in charge and is running the
remote.It's all powered by your chip,made by woman.Let me kow what you
think and try more/other.
thanx