If you can’t be in the audience at the annual TED conference, watching in-house speakers and a simulcast on a big screen of TED 2015 live from the main stage in Vancouver, Canada is the next best thing! NCR was one of 200 hosts of a local TEDx event with its first TEDxNCRLive on Tuesday, March 17, 2015. NCR staff had an opportunity to spend a day learning from world-renowned thinkers and innovators. Nearly one-hundred NCR employees joined us to hear from the following thought leaders live. In typical TED talk fashion, they made us think and then rethink our preconceived notions.

• Rich McKay, President & CEO, Atlanta Falcons, generated great excitement from the audience in his talk, Innovating in a space that doesn’t innovate. Rich discussed designing and building the world’s greatest stadium with a focus on innovation in an industry where timeline and budget have historically driven the design process. He described the team’s approach to designing a truly iconic stadium that will not only be a beautiful design, but deliver a superb fan experience.

• Jose Resendiz, Chief Innovation Officer, Digital Insight, an NCR company, wove a fascinating story of his own physical transformation in training to complete an Olympic triathlon and the parallel lessons that translate to technology innovation in his talk, Sink or swim: the right stroke for innovation. He took the innovation principles of customer empathy and rapid experimentation and applied them to a branch banking process to create a truly exceptional and seamless mobile/in-person customer transaction experience.

After the live speakers, we tuned into the TED 2015 simulcast to learn more from the innovators, scientists and artists who shared their vision of what’s on the horizon in technology and society. Interested in knowing more about TEDxNCRLive? Watch this highlights video:

If you want to see the entire video for each speaker, click on their name: Rich McKay, Jose Resendiz. TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or less). TED began in 1984 as a conference where Technology, Entertainment and Design converged, and today covers almost all topics — from science to business to global issues — in more than 100 languages. Meanwhile, independently run TEDx events help share ideas in communities around the world.