Compute Midwest brings together big brains to talk big ideas at the Kauffman Center

Michael Gelphman has a message for Kansas City’s business leaders: “If you’re a company that’s not thinking about the future, you’re in the past.” 

Gelphman, the founder of the Kansas City IT Professionals community, hopes to get local businesspeople pondering the future Thursday, November 13, during his third annual Compute Midwest conference, at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. And he wants to keep the momentum going with a two-day hackathon November 15 and 16 at Intouch Solutions (7045 College Boulevard, Overland Park). This is all an unofficial prelude to the Kauffman Foundation’s Global Entrepreneurship Week, November 17–23, with events (40 of them local) in 150 countries.

There’s no denying the trendiness of high-dollar, tech-y, big-idea conferences. Kansas City hosts a few each year, and “can’t miss” tech-focused gatherings seem to occur nationwide every month or so. But Compute Midwest differentiates itself from other startup inspiration-athons by focusing on ideas that will alter the world in this lifetime. This year’s slate features brainiacs who are changing the way we think about space travel, robotics, 3-D printing and computing, on a scale affecting the day-to-day lives of people worldwide.

Take Peter Weijmarshausen, co-founder and CEO of Shapeways, which is working to make 3-D printing affordable to everyone.

“This is almost like the ’80s with regular printers,” Gelphman says. “They started to become more commonplace, getting into more homes. One day, most people will have one. They’ll become really cheap.”

This technology could lead to incredibly simple manufacturing, for people and companies, Gelphman says. Even NASA has taken notice, sending a 3-D printer to the International Space Station to test whether replacement parts can be made onboard rather than shipped from Earth.

In a bit of remarkable timing, Jane Poynter, CEO of space tourism company World View Enterprises, is slated to speak about the business of cheaply getting civilians into the stratosphere. Her speech comes weeks after two private companies lost spacecraft in separate crashes and one person died. World View’s goal is to cut the cost of sending people into the outer reaches of Earth’s gravity by launching them in a capsule lifted by a balloon rather than in a rocket. The company’s business model requires no special training for passengers and puts an emphasis on comfort during the flight.

“She’s trying to make space travel more accessible for more people,” Gelphman says. “Maybe one day, it’s the price of going to Europe or something like that. Who knows? But think about how amazing that would be.”

Other speakers include the founder of iRobot (the maker of the Roomba vacuum cleaner), the chief technology officer of IBM’s Watson cognitive-computing system, Intel’s chief futurist, and the director of the Information Innovation Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

A gathering of this many forward thinkers doesn’t come cheap. Tickets cost $329 until November 13, and $419 after. For those priced out of attending, Gelphman has a suggestion: Get your boss to pay for it.

Compute Midwest’s website even has a form letter for employees to give to managers to sell them on the conference.

“You can’t quantify inspiration,” Gelphman says. “But a little bit of big-picture thinking can change how people approach everyday problems. Just one little fragment of a sentence that somebody might hear from one of these speakers might give them an idea about how they could change something internally in their company.”