A Sarasota Version of TED Talks Inspires Ideas

In 1996, Dutch book publisher Nelleke van Lindonk got a phone call from her husband, Peter, who was in Monterey, Calif., attending one of the TED (technology, entertainment, design) conferences that a non-profit group stages worldwide as a forum for innovative ideas. “ ‘Wow, this is amazing,’ ” she recalls him telling her.

“He met so many people who had nothing to do with his own job,” she says. “He really got inspired by it.”

At a TED conference two years later, the van Lindonks suggested to TED founder Richard Wurman that he create a Dutch version of the event.

Wurman basically told them to do it themselves. And in 1999, the van Lindonks launched PINC — People, Ideas, Nature and Creativity — as an annual, daylong conference in Zeist, Holland, mimicking the TED format with a series of presentations by speakers from diverse disciplines and backgrounds.

The van Lindonks, meanwhile, had been winter visitors to Sarasota since the 1980s. Four years ago, they began talking about expanding PINC to Sarasota. Peter van Lindonk died shortly afterward, but Nelleke and son Olivier, a professional sports agent at IMG in Bradenton — along with Olivier’s wife, Karen Fay, and local entrepreneur Anand Pallegar — continued the discussion.

In late 2014, PINC made its American debut with a sold-out event at the Florida Studio Theatre in downtown Sarasota. Last December, it moved to the larger Sarasota Opera House and doubled its audience size to about 470. The event featured 16 international speakers, who talked for up to 20 minutes each about their life’s work and passions — from neuropsychology to classical music to the mating rituals of cicadas.

“Normally, you might go to a dental or legal conference and only meet people in your particular field,” says Fay, director of PINC Sarasota. “It’s when you interact with different people that you begin to think about things in a different way.”

At the third annual conference in December, PINC’s speaker lineup will include an “explanation designer,” “artographer” and professor of animal science.