We are excited to tell you about one of our key non-film events at the Tribeca Film Festival: the second annual Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Awards, which will be held Tuesday, April 26 at Citigroup Auditorium. This ceremony/luncheon (11 am to 2 pm) is presented by the Tribeca Film Festival in association with Professor Clayton Christensen and the Disruptor Foundation.

So what are the Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Awards?

The second annual Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Awards celebrates one of the business world's most shocking theories. Disruptive innovation explains how two guys working in a garage frequently decimate great companies, and how simpler, more accessible products and ideas offer a scalable blueprint for the future using the tools and insights of Disruptive Innovation 2.0.

“Tribeca, since its inception, has been a living laboratory for disruptive innovation, where culture and storytelling of all shapes and flavors have learned to dance with and embrace new realities, including rapidly changing technologies and business models,” said Festival founder Craig Hatkoff. “We are thrilled to introduce our artists and audiences to this powerful theory of change through its originator, Professor Christensen and what the future might hold. The goal is help people quickly identify and unleash disruptive potential across a broad spectrum of human endeavor. Clay is inviting everyone to help improve the theory and look for anomalies that otherwise can’t be explained. This is the essence of a paradigm shift.”

Speakers will include Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, the father of disruptive innovation; and Eric Steven Raymond, author of the 1997 open source manifesto, entitled The Cathedral and the Bazaar. 

Honorees will each receive the Maslow's Silver Hammer Award, created using disruptively-innovative 3D printers that will be on site.

The 2011 Disruptive Innovation Award honorees are as follows:

Lifetime Achievement Award: Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. With only 50 employees, and 450 million users, Wikipedia has changed the face of the world of collaborative information sharing.

Special Recognition Award: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), for its role in creating, founding and funding of the Internet.

Book of the Year: The Social Animal, by David Brooks, author and noted New York Times columnist.

Other award recipients include:

The BP Spillcam and U.S. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.). Markey’s relentless efforts provided the public with a live feed “spillcam,” revealing the devastation occurring on the ocean floor.

The Jefferson Bible, created by President Thomas Jefferson. A polymath and deist, Jefferson used a razor blade to cut and paste his own version of the Bible entitled The Moral Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth, in four languages: English, French, Greek and Latin.

The Digital Disruption: Connectivity and the Diffusion of Power, by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. Published in Foreign Affairs magazine in October 2010, this piece eerily presages the events in the Middle East that started to unfold in December 2010. Cohen is adjunct fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and director of Google Ideas, and Schmidt is Executive Chairman of Google.

3D Systems, for additive manufacturing (3D printing), advances in alloys and printing technologies represent one of the most promising advances that have the potential to change the entire economic landscape.

Xtranormal, for pioneering text-to-video animation technology.

Charter Cities: Paul Romer, an entrepreneur and senior fellow in the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, will accept the award. The theory behind charter cities: Sometimes it is easier to start over than to fix legacy issues and get bogged down by politics, legal hurdles and special interests.