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,