How TED Talks fuel global debate for innovation

I’m sure that at some point you have been inspired by watching a TED talk. Arguably, within the world of innovation and disruption, these events — both the original and their “unofficial” versions — are among the most important in the world when it comes to spreading ideas and futurism.

In fact, the very style of doing and speaking at the event has become a benchmark. So much so that TED’s curator, entrepreneur Christ Anderson, has released a best seller entitled, in Brazil, TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking. To speak at TED is to speak at an event that encourages new ideas, great projects for the future, and that can impact millions of people around the world.

But where did the idea of creating a forum for innovation come from? As I will show you below, the idea of TED is closely linked to technology and the desire to transform the future by thinking in a modern way. It is a story that can inspire many people to think about new ventures in the edtech market.

A forum for innovation

TED came into being in 1984 when Richard Wurman noted that the future is the result of three things: technology, entertainment, and design. In fact, the acronym TED comes from these three words. Wurman, together with his colleague Harry Marks, devised an event that, at the time, looked more like an invention fair than the discussion forum that is the hallmark of TED today. However, from the very first moment it was clear that the two founders were right: many of the products and ideas presented in 1984 would be part of the future. In that edition, they presented:

• The compact disc prototype;
• The Apple Macintosh prototype;
• The first CGI demos (by Lucasfilm);

Math pioneers like Benoit Mandelbrot were also part of the event. However, the first TED was financially unsuccessful, and the second was only held six years later — but since then TED has become an annual event.

As the event grew in popularity and modern times progressed, it became increasingly clear that the debates held within the forum (which until then was by invitation only) should be open and the event should be non-profit. In 2002, with the entry of curator Chris Anderson, TED turned to the internet, and in 2006 the talks started to be posted on the web.

The transformation of the model

It is from this moment on that the conferences take on their current character: each speaker has 18 minutes to make his or her presentation and the lectures are no longer about technology, but about the innovations and transformations that society needs to discuss today. And these discussions are so broad and diverse in their expressions that, when we stop to analyze them, many come from very specific niches. For example, in a discussion about “invisible communities” at TEDxMileHigh, Esther Sullivan talked about the community of motor home and mobile home dwellers, a topic hardly discussed at all.

Another common feature of TED talks is that the speakers usually have first-hand, empirical, lived-in knowledge. For example, Robert Hoge has a brilliant talk on identity and plastic surgery in which he talks about his own choice to keep the scars of the tumor he was born with on his face rather than undergo successive facial reconstruction surgeries.

It is this kind of knowledge that allows TED talks to provide innovative and unexpected insights — often foreshadowing problems that the world will experience. The interest of TED speakers is always personal: there is an emotional engagement and a genuine concern to reach their audience (which is why the language of a TED speaker is strikingly simple: according to Chris Anderson himself, many talks are written in elementary school language, something that can be verified by the Hemingway app).

A clear example of this is in the talk that Bill Gates gave in 2015: he predicted that the world was not prepared for a pandemic — a prediction that, unfortunately, proved prophetic some four years later, with the arrival of COVID-19 in our lifetimes. And this prophecy was made in the simplest of languages, if you watch the lecture.

Within the field of education, innovative ideas also find room for dissemination thanks to TED. As a highlight, there was a 2006 talk by Sir Ken Robinson, whose title is the controversial question “Do schools kill creativity?” Incidentally, this was the first talk to reach over 10 million views on the conference platform, signaling the global popularization of TED as a hotbed of ideas for the future. In 2009, the number of video views on the TED website already exceeded 50 million, and two years later, 500 million. The following year, the site reached its first billion views.

As Chris Anderson says, from an auditorium event for 800 people, TED suddenly became a major media event with a large online platform. However, “The conference is still our engine.” After all, it is the ideas presented on the TED stage, not the size of the platform, that generate interest and hold the audience’s attention. And because of its fast-paced format and the uncompromising ideas aired there, the need to take the format and stimulate debate in locations where the event does not visit has become evident.

To disseminate “ideas worth spreading” (which is how the organizers classify the spirit of TED), TEDx was created, a sister event in the conference mold. Every year, more than three thousand TEDx events are held on all continents — including Brazil: after all, we are a hotbed of innovation. We are one of the countries that most create innovative ideas and attract investments in startups worldwide (as shown by the positive results of the first quarter of this year). Therefore, we also have a great need to have a forum for discussion. It is not surprising, therefore, that TEDx have already been held in all regions of the country: Mato Grosso, Maranhão, Pará, Goiás, and Rio Grande do Sul have already hosted TEDx. There are also standard editions, such as TEDx São Paulo.

In my opinion, an event like TED shows the essentiality of spreading contemporary views and knowledge. It also shows something else, just as important as the need to spread modern themes and issues: that it is possible to transmit high-quality knowledge, disseminated by leaders, over the Internet. TED attracts, shapes, and inspires.

Why not extend this lesson?