Archive for the ‘Club Activities’ Category

New Directions

Thursday, November 13th, 2008

The Entrepreneurship and Innovation Club has decided to pursue some new directions. At the 12 November meeting, two new activities were added to the club charter following a great discussion by the members:

  • Continuing the education of the members (EMBA grads all) in collaboration with the University of Ottawa, OCRI and other organizations. This activity will see the members research and publish papers in areas of interest.
  • A business advisory service & resource for members and for the community at large. There seems to be a need for this in the Ottawa area.

Both these activities generated a fair amount of excitement in the members and we are eager to get them off the ground this winter.

The club will continue to build on what we have already been doing well in providing guest speakers and opportunities for networking.

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More on the Charter

Monday, October 27th, 2008

In the last post, I discussed how we will develop and strengthen the club charter at the 12 Nov. 08 meeting.  The method we have chosen is a wiki, which will be installed in the protected area of the club web site.  We (the club coordinators) will fill the wiki with the current charter and ask members to help write the missing sections related to what the club will be doing going forward.  The wiki software should be installed shortly and an e-mail with more detailed instructions will be sent to the members.

For those non-members reading this post, the results of the group effort will be posted on this blog.  If you have any ideas, please add them to the comments.

Now I know you have many questions, the first likely being – What’s a wiki?  A wiki is web-based software that allows a group of people to collaboratively write a collection of documents.  The best example is wikipedia.  Each page in the wiki is a document and each page can be edited quite easily by anyone.  It is a great tool for collecting and sharing knowledge in a group.

In Wikis – A Disruptive Innovation, Cindy Gordon writes:

The wiki paradigm is disruptive because it is a low-cost alternative that brings key editing features into the hands of users. The approach increases the collaborative productivity of an organization or its extended ecosystems.

Overall, wikis increase the socialization process, enabling collaboration to generate at warp speed. Socialization underpins the sharing of ideas, and hence innovation capacity increases from wiki infrastructure.

Add to that that a wiki is cheap to implement and it is a powerful tool in the innovation arsenal of any firm.  Keep that in mind as you work on the club charter.

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Developing a Charter

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

The club “management” – a group of the most excellent volunteers – met last night to discuss the direction to take the club in the upcoming months.  There are two questions to consider:  what value should members get from the club and what value can the club provide back to the community?  While the management group managed to develop some good ideas, the club as a whole should be part of the discussion.  To facilitate this approach, we will create a brainstorming forum on the web and ask the members for ideas.  At the next meeting, we will discuss the ideas and further develop a set of them, from which we will select the best and develop the basis of the charter.

Some things to consider in developing these ideas:

  • Who we are: as alumni from the EMBA program of University of Ottawa, we speak the same (business) language but we have a diverse set of backgrounds, experiences and current jobs;
  • The time we can devote to this activity:  most members are fully employed or working on starting their own companies.  Everyone’s time is valuable;
  • What you want to get out of it: as a member, your participation is predicated on perceived value.  Can you articulate that?  What excites you about this group and its potential?

Here are some starter ideas:

  • A peer group for sharing of information, experience and learning.  We would use our common interests to focus on relevant topics presented by members and guest speakers;
  • An idea incubator where we pool our talents and develop business ideas that members can then spin off into companies;
  • A coaching group for other entrepreneurs in the external community who are growing their businesses and may need advice.  They could come and present their plans to us and we could provide feedback.

There are many other ideas.  Please comment and add your own.

Members can expect an e-mail with more information shortly and links to the brainstorming page.

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