If necessity is indeed the mother of invention, an economic meltdown should spark lots of new ideas – some good, some so-so, some the sort you’re embarrassed to admit you ever held dear (leg warmers, anyone?) This coming weekend marks the 10th Nantucket Conference, which aims to foster new ideas and innovation in the New England technology field. One of its organizers is Scott Kirsner, who writes a Boston Globe column on innovation, and has a new book out about creative artists using the Internet to their financial advantage. When I met with Scott near his home in Cambridge, he talked about how the conference has changed since its inception, and what New England can do to keep the technology field a vibrant in the current economic climate.

What prompted the first innovation conference?
The Nantucket one started in 1999, when we were in the first Internet craze. What we noticed was that all the big schmooze fests were in California. It felt weird that there wasn’t anything here. We did the first one in May of 2000, the peak of the dot.com boom. It still felt pretty heady, and it was sold out and we filled the room.

What have been the big shifts in the ensuing nine years?
The pendulum swung real hard away from Internet businesses, and then it swung back with the whole web 2.0 phenomenon. But it’s also changed to include things like clean tech, telecom hardware, video games and robotics, and anything that feels like a growth area.  The interesting thing is, we tried to stretch into the life sciences and medical devices, and the conference really rejected that. They really are two separate groups of people. That was the reason we started Convergence [a separate conference for the life sciences.]

Personality-wise, are the two groups different?
Yeah, Nantucket always been more about, “hey, we’re going to have fun and talk about what’s new.”  It definitely feels more like a family reunion now that it’s been going on for 10 years. Convergence is a little more serious. People come from these deep science backgrounds. 

What’s important for the field to focus on going forward?
One hobbyhorse I’ve been on lately is better communicating what’s happening here to the rest of the world. We’ve never done it well, and we’ve never done it in the sense of communicating as a region. When you talk about trying to compete with a state a big a California, you can’t do it just as Rhode Island or Massachusetts. 

The conferences and much of your writing has focused on technology companies, but your recent book – Fans, Friends and Followers – is about individual artists and how they can make money online.  Why the switch?

I got off on a different track where I started writing more about technology and the entertainment industry. One thing I noticed is that for an independent musician or artist or novelist, there’s a sea change happening. They used to be able to focus on the creativity and let the studio or producer worry about the sales. A lot of that responsibility is falling on artists now, and for the last year I’ve been interviewing artists who have been in the forefront, like the writers Brunonia Barry and Lisa Genova, and Steve Garfield, a videoblogger.

What’s your biggest piece of an advice to an artist who wants to pay the rent?
Build relationships with websites and blogs that already have big audiences and collaborate with them. It’s just too hard to put up your own website and try to drive people to it. What you want are relationships with like-minded websites where there are already a lot of people hanging out. Guest blog with them.  It’s the difference between opening a store on well-trafficked Newbury Street versus picking some suburban development where they just started building houses.