J.P. Anderson, editor-in-chief of Michigan Avenue Magazine, Brad Keywell, CIW’s founder and chairman, and Jessica Malkin, CIW’s executive director, led the discussion with six members of the CIW community, reflecting on CIW’s beginnings, how its influence has impacted the city and what its goals are for the future.

Also sitting at the table were Leslie Bluhm of the Bluhm/Hefland  Social Innovation Fellowship (BHSI) and member of the CIW Advisory Board; Patricia Cox, philanthropist and member of the CIW Advisory Board; Mike McGee, Co-op member and founder of The Starter League; Imran Khan, Co-op member and founder of EMBARC; Jimmy Odom, Co-op member and founder of WeDeliverand Hebru Brantley, CIW’s artist in residence.

“My husband, David Hefland, and I decided to start a fellowship (BHSI) that would help very young social entrepreneurs with their own ventures,” Bluhm said. “We started working with Jessica, who had a lot of amazing, great ideas… and helped us see that the connection with CIW would be the perfect marriage.”

The rest of the group found CIW in similar ways through networking, and others by pure chance. What connected them all was the love for ideas and the need to put them in action.

“Starting businesses or CIW, it’s all about storytelling,” Keywell said. “I went around and told the story about what we were going to create and people liked what they heard. In fact, really without any exception, every entity and organization we spoke to responded by saying, ‘I’m in.’”

The entire morning discussion was drawn out—literally—by Ryan Robinson, Lindsay Roffe and Dusty Folwarczny, the three co-founders of the Ink Factory Studio, a local company that transcribes meetings into real-time, hand-drawn visuals. A sandwich, many light bulbs and the Chicago skyline were just a few of the images gracing their white canvas at the end of the almost two-hour roundtable.

One of the main themes was centered on not playing it safe and how CIW helps encourage local organizations and entrepreneurs to take risks – because there will always be a community to support them no matter how many times they fail.

“We are lucky because we are a city-based ideas festival with a year round community,” Malkin said. “We get the benefit of making Chicago a model city for the world and being able to use Ideas Week in order to start and incubate ideas models that might work to solve issues of healthcare and education and be able to be a city of best practice.”