TEDxBoston

Melissa Withers

Warehousing the aging Woodstock generation in today’s elder care institutions simply won't do. The Elder Experience Lab reveals insights into how seniors prefer to interact with caregivers, utilize private and shared spaces, care for body and mind, and ultimately, what they think the nursing home of the future can (and should) look like.

Watch it on demand (RT: 21:35)

Watch Melissa Withers' TEDxBoston Talk

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Biography

Melissa Withers, Executive Director, Business Innovation Factory

Melissa Withers is the executive director of the Business Innovation Factory, where she focuses on helping organizations collaborate across traditional boundaries to launch new solutions in areas like education, health care, green energy and customer experience.  BIF, a unique non-profit organization headquartered in Providence, Rhode Island, hosts activities and runs experiential projects that enable partners to design and test new models for delivering value across the public and private sectors.   Melissa previously served as the director of communications and innovation programming for the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation.  Prior to returning to Rhode Island in 2004, Melissa served as assistant director of communications and public affairs for Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she spent several years developing Whitehead’s science communication and outreach efforts. She also is a board member of Young Voices, a youth-empowerment organization that teaches young people to be effectively conversant in the adult policy debates that define youth experience. 

About the Business Innovation Factory

The not-for-profit Business Innovation Factory (BIF) seeks to help organizations collaborate across traditional boundaries to design, test and implement new systems-level solutions to the major problems of our day, such as education, health care, and energy independence.  With a commitment to understand and improve the experience of the citizens at the center of these important systems, BIF focuses on events, programs and projects that enable partners to develop and test new models for delivering value across the public and private sectors and transfer these learnings back into their organizations.