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.

A group of about 20 EI Club members visited with David Watters of Global Advantage Consulting Group last night. It was an informative evening with an innovative strategic management consulting firm that specializes in the evaluations of complex ecosystems within government and business environments and clusters.

One of the outputs of their work is a map of linkages and relationships between the multitude of players that make up the ecosystem. It is especially effective for complex public policy analysis. The map shows all the stakeholders in the ecosystem and identifies the flows of money, people, products and information between them. For someone connected with that world, the map is a high-level overview of how activities are controlled, managed and promoted. It also highlights weaknesses in the overall system that may impact the public policy or business results.

David explained that many leaders of government and industry today have trouble with the increasingly complex situations that they are dealing with simply because they can not assimilate all the material required to make effective decisions. When entering office, a minister is typically provided a briefing stack by his staff that is several feet thick, filled with detailed briefing notes in a variety of subjects. It is almost impossible for the minister to absorb all of this information and make sense of it in a timely fashion. The ecosystem maps are an attempt to reduce that pile of briefing notes to a single, albeit large, sheet of paper which illustrates the operational networks and provides the manager with deeper understanding of the work challenges. It is a study of policy as a system.

As a starting point for learning and discussion, the maps are fantastic. Each identified linkage represents a rich relationship between organizations and the issues they face. People who live in that environment can spend hours excitedly talking about each link. For new people and businesses, the maps provide a guide to learning about how to enter that ecosystem, who the key players are, what regulations will affect them, what licensing protection exists, where they can get funding or support, and a host of related questions.

Global Advantage is growing from a boutique consulting shop into a larger organization. They are expanding into new markets outside of Canada such as China and India. They are also working to develop an on-line method of presenting the rich information contained in their maps in a form that can be effectively sold as a product/service to the organizations that live within these complex ecosystems. This will not be a trivial task. If they are successful, the result could be truly innovative.

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.

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.

Welcome!

This is the first of hopefully many interesting and informative posts on the activities of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Club - a collection of Executive MBA allumni from the University of Ottawa with diverse experience in business and government. 

The blog is aimed at those interested in entrepreneurship and innovation.  It will cover relevant topics, club business and notes from talks of guest speakers.  It will also provide a forum for discussions surrounding the broader interests and activities of the members.

We also want to take advantage of the power of social media while we are at it.  You are encouraged to subscribe to the blog, comment on the entries, and link to it from your own blogs or websites.  Requests for cross-links to relevant websites and blogs will be approved.  If you are a member and you want to contribute, please contact me or the person holding the baton at the time.  The more the merrier.