Oh boy, what a fantastic week this was !

More than 40 speakers, 7 keynotes, 15 R&D sessions, 3 face to face discussions, and a great opening and closing session.

We did some cool “order from chaos” things: Peter Hinssen has an AHA ! moment on his flight to Hong-Kong, and produced a brand new mind blowing presentation on the limits of the web. This was the start of Innotribe @ Sibos and set the scene for the quality level we were aiming for the rest of the week.

We also re-designed the workshops as the hours and days passed.

Russ Daniels – Vice President and CTO of EDS/HP decided on the spot not to deliver his planned PowerPoint, and instead gave a whiteboard session on cloud. It was like getting a private lecture by your most favorite professor at university. Awesome !

Below a short interview with Russ after that whiteboard session:

We improvised a debate with Aza Rasking from Mozilla Labs and Greg Skibiski of SenseNetworks on the Innotribe stand.

Here is an interview with Aza:

We had our Chief Executive Officer of Happiness – Mariela Atanassova – who was our super-sweet host on the Innotribe stand. All speakers felt immediately at home by the attention and care of Mariela. Mariela did awesome things in the background and produced very nice visualisations: are your going to post them somewhere, Mariela ?

What was really exciting were the Innotribe Sibos Labs where more than 50 folks took more than 10 hours out of their normal agenda to brainstorm and work on new ideas during workshops facilitated by Philippe Coullomb from The Value Web. Thank you very much to each of the 50 individuals who participated in the Innotribe labs.

The teams were lead by our 6 “Innotribe leaders”: Peter Hinssen from A-Cross, Nick Davies from Lombard Risk Management, Casper van Amelsvoort – Rabobank, Mary Knox – Gartner Research, Chris Skinner – Balatro Ltd – but more knows as active blogger on The Financial Services Club Blog, and Tim Collins from Wells Fargo. Leaders: you did a fantastic job !

In addition the teams were coached by 2 great guys from the venture capitalist community: Mattheus Krzykowsky from Venturebeat, and Eghosa D. Omoigui, Director Strategic Investments for Intel Capital. Your contribution was beyond any expectation !

We got a lot of coverage. Of course there is our own Innotribe at www.innotribe.com: Jeroen was our flying reporter during the week. And we has a lot of tweets #innotribe.

There is also a great article on Finestra about Innotribe – detailing the different pitches – and we made the cover page of friday’s Sibos Issues publication. You can download that publication here. See also Chris Skinner’s reports on Innotribe. Good example is here. Of course also Jeroen’s coverage on Innotribe.com

In the end, there was a winner. The eMe project of the Cloud team, lead by Peter Hinssen & Nick Davies. What a pitch ! As reported by Finestra, Guy Kawasaki loved it:

Kawasaki was impressed with the pitch, and said it sounded to him something like "Mint on steroids meets Open ID". He was also clearly impressed with the presentation skills of group leader Peter Hinssen, managing director of A-Cross Technology. "You’re just full of sh*t enough to be really attractive to a VC," he said.

Or also:

This presentation is better than 98% of the VC-pitched i see every day in Silicon Valley

Matteo Rizzi was great when he opened the “Grand Finale” with a “wake up and smell the coffee sunshine” type of call to the public. It was clear that he spoke straight from the heart and wanted to shake up the fully packed room. “look at what we have realized in the course of just 4 days at Innotribe” Create the right atmosphere, provide coaching and a sounding board, challenge the ideas and you end up with 3 executable ideas! “But this must not be a one-off thing” he warned. Innovation has to become a continuous and sustainable process and everybody in the banking industry must understand that this is critical for our survival.

Was Innotribe @ Sibos 2009 a one-off ? Certainly not. We are designing Innotribe as an ongoing innovation engine for the SWIFT community. We will be present a quite a number of regional events. We are preparing an on-line collaboration and idea generation tool. And last but not least, we are starting to scout and recruit speakers for next year. Where do we set the bar ? High, very high ! I would like that next year that all speakers match this year’s quality levels of speakers such as Peter Hinssen, Aza Raskin from Mozilla Labs (interview here), Russ Daniels from HP (interview here), and Joe Weinman from AT&T.  With that, you now also know my personal top-4 for this edition of Innotribe @ Sibos 2009.

Probably the biggest outcome of this Innotribe @ Sibos is that we have build a network of great smart people that we can call at any time if we need help for Innotribe or the next edition of Sibos.

Thanks to everybody who has contributed to this edition of Innotribe @ Sibos.