Advanced Diploma videos

During the residential some of us (I actually think most of us) gave short interviews with some background information, our expectations and first impressions.

I think my interview is the most boring one, and I'm the slowest speaker of all, but anyway.

Emily is absolutely wonderful and a very animated person too.

Dash is a constant source of inspiration – things he does with Global Entrepreneurship Week in Malaysia are overwhelming!

You can get a very good impression of what the team at ADE is like this year.

http://www.cfel.jbs.cam.ac.uk/programmes/diploma/videosandpodcasts.html

Extended iWeekend concept

Entrepreneurial culture in Russia is in its infancy. Hi-tech startups are slowly starting to gain traction, but the number of them is still rather small, as a lot of people don't really realize how to take their idea forward.

On the cultural level we're in a rather difficult situation – if you consider Russia from the point of view of Geert Hofstede's cultural dimensions (www.geert-hofstede.com) we're in trouble: high power-distance, low individualism, high uncertainty-avoidance (note: there is no official Geert Hofstede data for Russia, so I'm using Raghu Nath and Kunal K. Sadhu, "Comparative Analysis. Conclusions, and Future Directions," in Comparative Management -A Regional View; Raghu Hath, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Publishing Company, 1988), p. 273.)

Innovation and entrepreneurship are hot topics for the government these days, and there are numerous activities like state venture funds, venture forums, incubators and so on, but they are mostly targeted at relatively developed ventures. And I strongly believe that innovation and entrepreneurial culture should be stimulated from the very bottom – if we have low risk-tolerance we could create an environment where early stage risk could be reduced, and if we're low on individualism we could create a team environment. These are the cultural reasons for the extended version of iWeekend.

If you look at Shane's Entrepreneurial Process (Shane. A general theory of entrepreneurship : the individual-opportunity nexus in New Horizons in Entrepreneurship series, Edward Elgar Publishing) everything starts with the existence of opportunity, then comes the discovery of opportunity, decision to exploit it, resource acquisition and so on. Here in Russia activities following the "decision to exploit" opportunity are already covered – we have entrepreneurial communities, who meet to discuss startup projects, invite experts and VCs to discuss them, business incubators can take them for further development.

However, I believe that activities should be stimulated at an even earlier stage, and we should distinguish between "ideas" and "opportunities" – not all ideas are opportunities, and it takes a good deal of effort to actually turn an idea into an opportunity (or to realize whether it's an opportunity or not), and this is where I want to come into play.

A lot of people have ideas they don't know how to handle – they don't realize if the idea is viable, if it is actually interesting to anyone except them, maybe an idea just needs a little tweak here and there to make it extremely attractive. While organizing iWeekend we've had one introductory meeting where participants shared their ideas and discussed them. The feedback to it was very positive, and having discussed this with several people we've decided to organize those meetings on a regular basis. A sort of a discussion club for entrepreneurs, and just people with ideas – it's important, because not all people who have ideas actually want to implement them (and vice versa – not all people who want to create a startup actually have an idea). The aim of this club is to bridge the gap between an "idea" and an "opportunity" by providing feedback to the author, making suggestions and giving advice.

We're planning to attract high-profile speakers (i.e. well-known serial entrepreneurs, media specialists, hi-tech specialists) to those meetings as well to have more credibility, attract more people and make it more interesting and dynamic. These meetings should happen on a regular basis (1-2 times a month) and will be free to attend to those interested. Once or twice a year we will also have "iWeekend weekends" where people with ideas will be able to present their projects and maybe get them implemented. (for more details on iWeekend check out http://www.iweekend.org)

Building a successful entrepreneurial ecosystem is impossible without involvement of educational institutions, and we're planning to have a separate programme for Universities, because students generally have different expectations. Having a community that could unite students from different universities with different backgrounds should create positive conditions for the emergence of new businesses.

Sources of income – as stated in the previous post I want to make money on this project. "Idea" meetings themselves should be free for participants, "iWeekend weekend" is a paid-for event, but the fee is minimal and can only cover the meals during the event. Possible sources of income, as I see them now, are:

• Corporate sponsorship – this is the most obvious, but the most tough at the same time;
  
• Educational – making paid programmes for Universities. Educational institutions are generally interested in providing entrepreneurial education for their students, and showing them that it's not just about science and technology, but also about money (which is kind of important for people in their early 20-s J)
  
• Headhunting – not all people who come will want to start their own business, but will rather be networking in search of better opportunities. On the other hand recruiting agencies are constantly looking for bright people for their clients, and our meetings can be a great opportunity to spot talent.
  
• VCs are looking for new projects. Some of them consider seed-stage investments as well. iWeekend is a great "filter" for them (this is the feedback we got from one VC after the first iWeekend), and they should be ready to pay for this service.
  

Right now I'm working on assembling an advisory board for iWeekend – high-profile people who would be ready to help me in bringing this project to life, would be ready to participate in regular meetups, and who will be able to support iWeekend with their "personal brands".

Another ambitious part of this undertaking is the hope to make Russian projects more international – right now a lot of local startups are targeting local market. The market is relatively big, so this strategy is justifiable. On the other hand local entrepreneurs don't really know how they can reach out to the global market, and I was hoping to bring some of the world-wide entrepreneurs for a few masterclasses here in Russia. Just to show our entrepreneurs that doing business on a global level is not as scary as it might seem. (And entrepreneurs from the Cambridge network are definitely on the top of my list)

As you can see the idea is rather ambitious, and as I'm acting in "effectuation" paradigm I'm trying to see how I can utilize the resources I have. If you have any ideas about all this – please drop me a note, or comment this post here.

Disclaimer: iWeekend is still a temporary title – the original iWeekend idea came from Spain, and we did the event as a part of the global iWeekend initiative. Further development of the concept was done by me, and I still don't have the confirmation from the iWeekend HQ that they like it. But if they don't I'll still go on under a different brand.

Projects I’m working on

As we're nearing the final assessment for the first part of the ADE, and have to submit a "knowledge application portfolio", I thought I would formulate my business idea here in this blog as well.

I actually have quite a few projects I am working on simultaneously:

• Consulting business – this is the ultimate source of income for me. I do product management & marketing consultancy for telecoms. As much as I like telecom business I'm rather tired of it, and I'm especially tired of having to work on several projects at the same time, so I'm really trying to make the consulting part obsolete by making more money on other ventures.
  
• Mobile TV – this is effectively the most developed startup I currently have. The original idea was to produce "made for mobile" TV content. Then, as we realized there was actually no real mobile TV market, we decided to start a mobile TV service, but instead of focusing on the technology side of the business (i.e. shrinking traditional TV content to fit small screens) we decided to focus on the product & marketing side and create a product that would be useful for customers (all the existing mobile TV attempts are not), and be customer-centric as opposed to technology-centric. We've been looking for a good technology partner, and found even more than that – we were lucky to find a company that has a very similar business approach (though they are very technical anyway), so now instead of creating the service from scratch we will be sourcing content for them. This would let us minimize the original investment (everything is financed from the "consulting" income) as we don't have to do branding, marketing, advertising, money collection, etc. ourselves and see the state of the market. We're really focusing on the bottom line here, so cash-cash-cash is all we're thinking about. The project is not really interesting or innovative anymore, because instead of creating a product we're just effectively re-selling the content. Applying fresh ADE knowledge – this is pure effectuation (search for Sarasvathy, Saras D. CAUSATION AND EFFECTUATION: TOWARD A THEORETICAL SHIFT FROM ECONOMIC INEVITABILITY TO ENTREPRENEURIAL CONTINGENCY. Academy of Management Review; Apr2001, Vol. 26 Issue 2, p243-263) – we're heavily relying on contingencies here (actually relying on contingencies might sound strange, but it has worked for us so far), and trying to use the opportunities and the resources we have to build something we can't yet imagine. Finding a technology partner has been a very lucky chance, and the change in business model really developed after that.
  
• Mobile Book Reader – an application for mobile devices (first of all, Symbian phones) to search for, download and read e-books and other e-texts. We're finishing the first version of the app in a week. This is not really a project, but rather a playground. eBooks are a blazing-hot topic these days, and I noticed that the Symbian end of the market was missing a decent ebook app and service. Besides, I'm a Symbian phone user myself. So I'm looking for contingencies here as well, but in order to be prepared and to stimulate my lucky chance I decided to start working on the topic, and have an application ready. So I'll keep fiddling around with it (maybe 5%-10% of my total work time) to see if anything comes out of it.
  
• iWeekend – the thing I'm starting to focus on. Originally iWeekend was a 3-day event where a bunch of geeks got together to create a project over the weekend – a complete project from scratch – from the idea to prototype + business model + presentation + business plan and everything else you would want from a startup. We've had one event in Moscow in October, and realized there was clearly the demand for it. So I'll be expanding this idea from now on. I already have a draft concept that I'll be developing and implementing. A more detailed post is to follow.
  

I will use iWeekend as a foundation for the assignment, because it is "double-useful" – iWeekend is an entrepreneurial venture itself, but I will also be using some of the concepts learnt at the ADE inside iWeekend itself – the incentive aims at developing entrepreneurship and innovative culture in Russia, so the synergies are quite obvious.

Online Theme 2 - The Organizational Context of Entrepreneurship

The whole online study period is divided into several 1-week-long sessions, and we're supposed to read A LOT of stuff during just one week, and share our views with fellow students.

Last week we've had a VERY interesting theme on Cultural context of entrepreneurship. It was very intense to me, because I only came back to Moscow on Friday, and we really need to wrap up all discussions on the theme on Monday. I didn't get normal access to the Internet while travelling (though I did make a few forum posts while going on the train from Edinburgh to London), so I really had to act fast on my arrival to Moscow - read, think & communicate.

The cultural theme was very rewarding - we all come from all over the world, so we really learnt a lot from each other. I found the Spanish and Malay examples particularly interesting (probably because I know very little about those countries), and India is very inspiring too - I now I should go there at some point. The thing here was that you don't typically get to learn about entrepreneurial culture from a textbook, and not that many people think about it, but if you do you would actually be pretty amazed to realize how much your cultural environment influences the way you do business. Amazing!

Now we're all about organizational context of entrepreneurship - and I feel that we're down to some more formall stuff - we're doing some bits & pieces from Organizational Theory, but in a very casual way. Well, we're not MBA's after all. Which is good, IMHO.

I just finished my forum post on ARM's contextual factors, so for you to just get an idea of what it's like, I'll re-post it here:

Unfortunately we didn’t ask that many questions about “contextual factors” during our visit, but I’ll try to make a few educated guesses here.

First of all, I’d like to note, that we’ve been in a rather unique position as compared to other visits, because we actually visited a very mature company, but we talked to the people who had been there since the very beginning, so we can give opinion on two sides here: SME and large company.

The early days of ARM demonstrated a very evident set of contextual factors for SME’s:

· Strategy aimed at gaining a large market share.

· No real cash-flow challenges (the company was a pretty well financed JV), but quite capital constrained (once the initial investments burnt out they had to sustain themselves, so it was crucial to secure the deals and deliver in time).

· Organizational structure was more than flexible: with an initial team of just 12 engineers + CEO there were no other options. People had to try multiple hats, and there was no clear hard structure in place.

· Decision making was super-fast.

· On the culture side: VERY customer-focused (and having browsed around a bit after the visit I have a feeling that ARM is still one of the most customer-focused companies on the market these days).

· Innovations: I think the most innovative thing about ARM was the business model (the designs themselves are innovative by definition, so it’s not really an innovation in the sense I mean here).

· Entrepreneurial thinking & action – definitely went to securing strong competitive advantage (quite successfully).

Currently ARM is a large multinational company, and I got the feeling that a lot of the “entrepreneurial spirit” is gone.

From the contextual factors ARM is a typical large company: focused on profits and market share, established assets & cash flow, hierarchical decision making (the process of analyzing and evaluating new opportunities is very formalized, and smaller and uncertain initiatives definitely look hard to pursue), new products and services are mostly introduced due to competitive pressure (nice article in Fortune about ARM with some insights about the competition and overall ARM history - http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/07/16/the-chip-company-that-dares-to-battle-intel/.)

The only VERY important difference about ARM and a “typical large company” is that ARM is still rather focused on customers, and I think that is what makes them so successful, and actually helps them to sustain their competitive advantage and market share.

What did they teach you?

I've finally been asked the question I'd been expecting to turn up, and that is: "what did they teach you?"

And that's a tough one to answer – we didn't have accounting, or strategic marketing, or management theory or whatever else for that matter. And "entrepreneurship" is no exact science (I surely know that now that I've read all the different "theories of entrepreneurship" – and there were 6 of those mentioned to us, and I bet there are at least a dozen more), and despite what our tutors had been telling us, I don't think you can "teach entrepreneurship". But rather – you can "teach a person how to become an entrepreneur" – because each and every person has to become an entrepreneur himself/herself.

So in fact, as I had pointed out in the previous post, we were tough to ask ourselves the right questions. And there is no right or wrong answers to those – each one decides for himself/herself.

To actually give an answer to the question I'd probably try to formulate the main questions from the session for myself:

1. High-growth or lifestyle business?
   
2. How do entrepreneurs learn?
   
3. Why be an entrepreneur?
   
4. What is an opportunity to an entrepreneur (what comes first?)
   
5. When do entrepreneurial organizations stop being entrepreneurial?
   
6. What is the best way for me to deal with risk and ambiguity?
   
7. How do I keep myself on track after failures?
   
8. Where do I find a charismatic CEO? J
   
9. How do I keep my work/life balance?
   
10. How do you transform your vision to values?
    
11. Who are my role-models?
    
12. How do I create projects for solving real needs instead of offering minor quality of life improvements?
    

Most of the questions don't have a universal correct answer (except #8 maybe, I wish someone could point me at the school of charismatic CEO's so I could go and recruit one).

I'm sure each of us would have different questions that we would ask after those 3 days, and that is the wonderful thing about the course. I'm sure we are going to get more traditional training as we move on (i.e. opportunity recognition, business plan, presentation etc.), but this first session was an important one for setting the scene for further action.

And it's no wonder that most of the questions are self-directed – it really is all about figuring out what you are there for, what and how you should focus on during your studies.

I'm not sure this post really answers the question, and if it were an essay I'd probably get a C for content.

P.S: The last question would probably be "how do I move to Cambridge?" but that's really a more practical one J

Residential Session 1: Entrepreneurial Awareness

To begin with, and to sum up all my previous excitedly positive feedback, I would still say that this experience was ultimately great, and the negative moments (yes, I think there were a couple) simply got buried in the pile of positive ones.

After a few days of reflections I thing I could give a more detailed account of the whole residential session, and some initial thoughts on the entire programme.

Our group has the privilege and the challenge of being the first intake for the Advanced Diploma in Entrepreneurship (ADE), which is the brainchild of Shai Vyakarnam and Jo Mills and a whole lot of other great people at Judge Business School CfEL, and the Institute of Continued Education. It took well over 3 years to design the course, and take care of all the official things, but as a result we are expected to be able to get an official degree from the University of Cambridge.

It's really great to be a part of a small group of just 9 people – originally the initial intake for ADE was supposed to be around 30 people, but luckily (for us) it ended up with just 9. And the most astonishing part is that Shai & Jo are envisioning the programme to grow to about a THOUSAND students yearly, which will definitely be a scalability challenge. As much as I like the way it is now I honestly don't believe it could be scaled to even 50-70 people.

I will not try to give a minute-by-minute account of the session, instead I will try to highlight some of the most important moments for me.

Day 1

The highlight of day 1 was definitely the attitude of the organizing team – it's a rare occasion when you see your teacher being as excited about delivering a course to you. Of course they had put several years into creating this thing, and still it was incredibly rewarding for us, and I hope we had managed to live up to the expectations. As I had pointed out in one of the previous posts we had a very diverse team –age-wise, country-wise and background-wise. We have 2 people from Latvia (country best represented this intake J), Australia, US, Ireland, Spain, Malaysia, Canada/Denmark (that's one person) and Russia (me). We have people of different ages and of various amounts of experience – from recent graduates to people who've "been there, done that". And all this creates an environment for some incredible cooperation.

At lunch we were introduced to the Advisory board that has some very seasoned entrepreneurs on it, including Jack Lang who did a brief expectations and motivations session after lunch. Now that to me was a bit of a negative part. Jack might be a good entrepreneur (in fact he IS a very good and successful one), but the session was mostly about funding and financing – of course the main idea of it was "what's in it for you?" – what sort of business do you want to have – a high-growth or a lifestyle business. But he mostly focused on the high-growth part not paying too much attention to the lifestyle one. And a lot of it was about venture funding – not necessary relevant to everybody. In my opinion it was too Ignite'y.

The interesting exercise of Day 1 was "Coat of Arms" – each of us had to create a personal 4-part coat of arms:

I like	I'm good at
I value	Motto

The interesting thing is that you can only write in the lower right corner ("Motto"), and you have to fill all other parts with pictures. Now, I'm quite a bad artist, but fortunately enough I had a couple of pictures the kids had given me back in Moscow, and I used those for the "like" block. I did some pretty poor drawing for the "I'm good at" and "I value" parts, and my motto was "technology is not a product". I think I have that flipchart sheet with me somewhere, so I might take a picture of that at some point and post it here. Anyway, the coats of arms were pretty diverse; I think only the upper left corner was common for a lot of us – obviously you can't do much w/out "family" being there.

The day ended with a brief introduction of Big Theoretical Concepts of Entrepreneurship by Shai. We then had to choose a couple of recommended articles to read and understand overnight, and then discuss with fellow group-members in the morning.

That was a tough 12-hour day – we started at 8.30AM, and finished at 8.30PM with some reading still to be done at night/morning.

 

Day 2

Our group (5 people out of 9) met at 8AM in the dining hall of Downing College to discuss the articles we had read at night.

Now that was intense. In my experience in Russia as a student we didn't typically do read-discuss things this way – usually we all read the same article and discussed it, and here we all read different articles and had to re-tell them to our peers. I think this is a very good exercise in team-work, and self-responsibility, because you get feel responsible not only for your own reading, but also for your team-members. And I'm not even mentioning totally different views on each question.

I'll probably do a separate post of "Theories of Entrepreneurship" to reflect more on the articles I found most interesting. But definitely the selection of articles was very broad and quite controversial – so we rather set new questions than got answers.

Lunch with Entrepreneurs in Residence was a very dynamic one. Once again I was amazed at the Cambridge Phenomenon – it's so easy to come up and talk to people here. I had met Jamie Urquhart before, and it was nice to meet him again, and actually ask him to introduce me to some people from Plastic Logic whom I had wanted to contact for a while (and yes, he really did introduce me a couple days later). Phil O'Donovan also gave me a couple of interesting insights on my projects. And general discussion after lunch was very interesting. I think it pretty much summed up what CfEL education is all about, but I hope that the videos of it will be posted online sooner or later, and I'll drop a link somewhere here.

The afternoon session by Yupar Myint on networking – as good as at Ignite in 2008, and that means wonderful. I keep being amazed with the people Shai had managed to attract to CfEL.

Dinner at Shai's house that evening was probably the highlight of the entire session. I try to avoid eating Indian food at restaurants, because I don't know any good Indian restaurants in Moscow or elsewhere (just because no one recommends them to me), and I'm afraid to come across a bad one. And the food prepared by Shai's cousin (an entrepreneur as well) was above anything Indian I had ever tried. So I'll probably have to ask what the name of her restaurant is, and that would be the only place for Indian food for me in the world. We had some really nice informal discussions with each other – just the way I like it. It's great being around people from all over the world, and get to talk freely on cultural issues, sharing your private experiences, and spotting differences and similarities between different cultures.

The final session at Shai's living room was lead by Caroline Lloyd Evans – I would call that a group psycho-therapy session. Don't get me wrong – nothing too bad or too private. But we did tell each other a lot about our personal circumstances, and it really makes you understand yourself better. Show-and-tell game from items from all over the world – mine was avoska-bag from Russia (search Wikipedia for "Russian avos" if you want to know what I talked about), and funny enough it was to realize the next day that in fact a perfect example of the Russian avos-attitude in our group actually came from a completely different part of the world J

 

Day 3

The last day of the course is always a bit sad to me. But at least I knew this time that this was just the beginning of our 15-month journey.

In the morning (8AM – auch!!!) we went for company-visits. Honestly, I didn't really want to go to ARM – I would rather have gone to broadersheet (I think that's the name), but it all turned out amazingly well. I had met Jamie (ex-ARM) before, and we had been told a lot about ARM at Ignite, so I was not really expecting anything dramatically new. But we just got a completely different account of the ARM history, and a very interesting one. Don't want to go into details here, but I'll try to get some presentations from the ARM-people, and maybe do some more reflections for myself or even post here.

The highlight of the days was "Delivering something before it's commercially ready is the right thing to do" (quote © ARM) – I know I'm a bit of a analysis-paralysis person, and I overdo the initial stage of each venture (sometimes to the extent that I don't actually do the venture itself), and I need to work on that. And here's a note to CfEL people – I'm not sure it's the case, but anyway – I think you are a little bit that way as well – there's no need to polish each and every handout you give us, there's no need to wait until you proofread it left-to-right and top-to-bottom – just give it out to us, and we'll be glad to see for ourselves.

The last (I don't take into account the library/VLE tutorial) session of the residential about Entrepreneurs as leaders and agents of change – a very controversial one. I would've said that it was my least favourite one, but I can't because it included one YouTube video that just set things straight in my head. It had a very good view on emerging markets as an ultimate source of entrepreneurial innovation, and probably the largest market for new enterprises – I am now completely re-thinking my book-reader project, because the parts of the picture are somehow beginning to get together for me.

The dinner at the end of the day was very nice, and some of us actually went kicking around 'till 2 or 3 in the morning J

We are all an amazing team now – not just students, but mentors as well. And we'll probably have one "informal" residential session between this one and the next one which is due in summer. Hint to CfEL – the break between residential is probably a tad too huge.

 

 

To sum it all up.

The programme is rather expensive, and I'm glad my wonderful wife let me put a huge chunk of our savings in it (Ka, you're the best, I love you), but I'm sure that it's worth every penny. It's not just education for me – it's a dream-come-true experience. I'd be glad to share it with people, so if you want to ask something about the programme, or have any other related questions – go ahead, and drop me a line.

Overall I feel that the residential has not given me answers to my questions/concerns, but rather added to the list of those. Which I guess is perfectly fine, because getting the questions right is half of the answer already.

Ouch…. That is almost 2000 words – 2/3 of our assignment for the 1^st module.

P.S: To fellow students – I'm not mentioning names on purpose,

the people

It's my second time at Cambridge/CfEL, and I keep being amazed at the people attracted.
We've had people from all over the world - from Australia and Malaysia, to Colorado and Ontario, and we've never had a single "culture clash", because we are actually all like-minded.

We all came from different background - be that education, or engineering, or sociology or whatever else, but we are sharing one "brain wavelength", and our cultural and personal backgrounds are in fact beneficiary for the whole team, because we can assess the same problem from completely different angles.
And working with like-minded people is the most rewarding experience one can ever have - I'm judging this not only by my CfEL experience, but by my previous academic and professional experience. But it's truly amazing how you can get a team of people of different ages, backgrounds, cultures sharing similar values. I don't really know how the selection process for the programme was organized, but the results are just fantastic.

Now that the residential session is over I'm a little bit worried how the online thing is going to work out for us, because emotions are an absolutely vital part of it right now, and online emotions get lost or distorted. But hopefully it's going to work, and I'll keep you all posted.

And I'll probably do a more practical and detailed account of the whole residential session. (during my flight to Kiev I guess)

very intensive

The course is very intensive, so we practically have no time for any of the personal stuff like blogging, or even twitting for that matter. Last night I got to my room at Downing aroud 10PM, and I still some reading to do by the time the team met at breakfast at 8AM. So it's VERY intensive. I thought Ignite was stressfull, but ADE is even more stressfull in terms of the amounts of stuff we have to do at residential sessions, but it's just the way I like it - stress helps you mobilize, and I've been a bit too relaxed recently (this was in fact one of the reasons I came here).

I'll probably write a more detailed post about my experience here later on.
But just one thing I absolutely have to mention is that Cambridge is probably the best place on Earth (or at least one of those) - the environment here is absolutely amazing, and the people here at Judge are fantastic. Now one of my mid-term goals is to come and work here, or at least do some business with a company from the Cambridge cluster, because I certainly want to come back here, and I also want to share this exerience with my family.

The time has come

The residential session starts on Tuesday (15^th), and there's a lot of stuff to be read before that.

In fact I only got access to the VLE (Virtual Learning Environment), the place where all the online studies take place, two days ago – honestly, I was starting to get worried that there would be no materials before the course, and we'll just have to start from scratch right there. Now I have the feeling that as long as it's the first time the programme is being administered the guys at JBS and Cont-Ed were just finishing things at the last moment (I got the Programme Handbook in the mail just a few hours ago).

I've been reading the Handbook with some agitation – I've never attended real courses at a foreign university, and the difference in approach is dramatic. Of course plagiarism is not encouraged in Russia either, but I don't think any student here knows what it entails. The pass/fail conditions look tough, and the assessments rules too, but then again I'm pretty sure that if our rules were expressed in such a formal way it would've looked the same. So I'm hoping it's just a matter of formality. Overall, right now I'm glad I decided to start with AD instead of doing an MBA right away, cause getting used to the rules is quite important. But I guess we'll see how it goes.

The VLE is based on moodle (the open-source e-learning environment), and is just another blend of a typical community framework with shared resources, forum, PMs and whatnot. We're supposed to have access to Orbit – the gateway to JBS' library, but it's not working for me right now, which is a shame because there's some reading to be done.

The first course of the programme is called Entrepreneurial Awareness and is all about the Entrepreneur (as I see it) – conceptual theories of entrepreneurship, success factors, basic opportunity recognition, and personal development for entrepreneurs. The latter one is probably the most important part for me at this point in my life, because I see a certain lack of motivation and drive to move forward, and enrolling on this course was one step towards finding an answer to these issues.

Surprisingly enough the amount of participants is rather small – in VLE I can see about 15 participants overall, and out of them at least 5 are tutors and administrators, which means there are less than 10 students. Which is good, and makes you feel somewhat special.

I guess this is the last post before the residential session and I might post something once I'm at Judge. Hey – we've got 24x7 access to the computer lab, so I might post something at night, because the library there is great, and I'll probably come there to do some reading.

 

Introduction

Hello and welcome!

My name is Peter Tatischev, and just recently I got awarded a place on the Advanced Diploma in Entrepreneurship programme at Cambridge University's Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning.

As far as I am concerned this is the first year this programme is being delivered, and I thought I'd try to blog about my experience with Cambridge, distance learning, the Judge Business School and entrepreneurial education. Hopefully this might be useful for future students, and maybe even for the people who are delivering this course as a source of feedback.

While my programme payments are being transferred I'll take some time to give a little bit of background about myself to better set the context of the entire blog.

I am an entrepreneur – I've been running a consulting business with my partner for the past 2 years – we provide product management and product marketing consultancy to telcos (mobile and fixed carriers, broadband providers, equipment vendors and the like) in Russia and the CIS countries, and we are also launching a startup of our own which is a "mobile TV service" and this is the project I will be taking forward in the course of the programme (there will be a post with a more detailed description of the project in a while).

I was at the Ignite programme at CfEL in 2008, and it was absolutely amazing and extremely useful, and it was one of the main reasons why I chose the advanced diploma.

Also, I'm considering doing an MBA, and Cambridge is on top of the list of schools I'm going to apply to. However, I see MBA rather as a long-term goal, so I thought the AD could make a good step towards it, and this is another reason.

And on a purely emotional side – studying at Cambridge has always been a dream of mine, last year I tasted it at Ignite, and this year I'm taking it further by doing a real qualification.

Of course I'm not trying to idealize Cambridge here – there certainly were drawbacks during Ignite, and there undoubtedly will be at the advanced diploma. The Ignite feedback form was quite extensive, but still not sufficient to give all the feedback and suggestions we had discussed with fellow students during the programme, so I'll try to do this here in this blog.

The programme is delivered mostly via the distance learning environment, and it's making things even more exciting.

And of course – if you have any questions or just want to talk about things – just drop me an email.