Cambridge Enterprisers

As I’m going back to Moscow after facilitating the Enterprisers programme in Cambridge/Wyboston Lakes I’m trying to reflect somehow on everything that happened over the past 5 days, and the main thought is that it was really great, and I’ve never had such an experience in my life.

I have facilitated and moderated various activities, but the structure and the environment that Shai, Neal an

d the CfEL team create is absolutely amazing. I’ve always been on the other side of the table on CfEL programmes and being on the “teaching” side is really special to me, and I greatly appreciate the opportunity.

Facilitating something like Enterprisers really takes a lot of knowledge and experience and I was super-lucky to have Bonnie Hacking as my co-facilitator – she gave me the confidence and support a first-timer needs.

We’ve had a really great team, and probably the most rewarding experience for me was to see the team working together and solving problems together – I was quite amazed with the spirit the team had and pace with which the guys worked. I don’t know what the role

of a facilitator was in putting this particular team together, but during last 2 days of the programme the team-spirit was really there, and I believe it was visible even during the stage performances the team made. And the really amazing and rewarding thing was that all the team members had made steps towards achieving the goals they had set for themselves at the beginning of the programme – in fact our “met” circle on the Objectives flipchart was too small to fit in all the post-it’s, and this totally made my day!

There are so many things I’ve learnt during those 5 days that it’s difficult for me to put it all together in my head, but I’m pretty sure it will eventually settle down and I’ll appreciate this experience even more.

A huge thank you to the Enterprisers team, Bonnie and the Green star team!

And I’m really looking forward to hosting Enterprisers in Russia!

GreenfieldProject summary

It's been a while since my last post, and I've been actively working on the development of my venture that is now called GreenfieldProject.

Below is a summary of the project, and I'd really like feedback and suggestions – drop me an email or comment!

The main aim of GreenfieldProject is to bring up the new generation of entrepreneurs who can realize risk and would be ready to embrace it.

GreenfieldProject is a grass-roots initiative by entrepreneurs and for entrepreneurs addressing issues every new venture faces at the very early stage of development:

• High perceived level of personal risk and low level of motivation;
  
• Lack of core team and expertise;
  
• Insufficient personal network;
  
• Inability to stress-test the viability of a business idea before implementation;
  

GreenfieldProject is a series of regular events where aspiring entrepreneurs and startup enthusiasts come together to discuss potential business ideas, recognize opportunities, meet potential partners, co-founders and team members and make first steps to realizing their dreams.

Tuesday@GreenfieldProject

Regular (twice a month) GreenfieldProject meetups consist of idea pitches and discussions as well as keynotes from distinguished entrepreneurs on topics that are relevant to startups (such as opportunity recognition, team formation, market analysis, idea evaluation, business planning etc.) and panel discussions with successful entrepreneurs.

The participants get an opportunity to practice their pitch, brainstorm their ideas and network with like-minded individuals as well as established entrepreneurs, managers, tech and marketing gurus.

Meetups will be held in partnerships with educational institutions and technology companies.

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. On the first stage, when the idea only exists in entrepreneur's mind the opportunity to share it with like-minded people and get competent feedback and reassurance is priceless, and can boost entrepreneur's self-efficacy and help him (or her) make the first step! And make this step right!

Harvest@GreenfieldProject

Creating startups is fun, and we don't see any reasons why people shouldn't enjoy it!

Harvest participants have a unique chance to take part in creating a completely new tech startup without sacrificing their daytime jobs, and with support from some of the best subject matter experts in the industry.

Aspiring entrepreneurs with new business ideas pitch their ideas to fellow professionals, get them interested and assemble teams around their ideas. Then they have two days to build a prototype, draft a business plan and create an inverstor's pitch.

A group of some of the best industry experts is available to support entrepreneurial teams on their projects – design & usability, programming, scalability, finance and business planning, marketing, SEO & PR – all the competencies you need to create a startup from scratch!

The final session gives teams an opportunity to present their pitches to a panel consisting VC's and distinguished entrepreneurs who then select the best team that has made the most progress.

The first Harvest@GreenfieldProject was held in the Moscow office of Microsoft February 20-21, 2010 and was a real success:

• 80+ participants
  
• 12 new projects
  
• 30+ experts consulted
  
• 20+ media partners spreading the word around (online & offline)
  
• 20 professional partners & sponsors
  
• Key partners: Microsoft BizSpark & Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning, Judge Business School, University of Cambridge
  

International@GreenfieldProject

Russian tech startups are hugely underrepresented on the international market due to several reasons:

• Inadequate language skills;
  
• Poor international network;
  
• Lack of international expertise.
  

GreenfieldProject will be addressing those issues by organizing regular English-only meetups, inviting experienced international entrepreneurs and organizing worldwide knowledge-exchange trips for Russian technopreneurs.

Partnerships

Developing an entrepreneurial culture is no easy task, and it's good to have people and companies who have been doing this for a long time ready to share their knowledge and experience.

The University of Cambridge's Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (CfEL), part of Judge Business School, is committed to inspiring and training individuals in the practice of entrepreneurship within one of the most active hi-tech clusters in the world, and has unique experience in developing entrepreneurial communities.

GreenfieldProject is the first project in Russia to be developed with expert support from CfEL staff and students, and we are going to use the most relevant knowledge and experience that can help us to foster innovation culture and promote startup entrepreneurship. CfEL can also provide access to a wide network of companies and professionals.

We are constantly working on expanding our network of international partners to extend the global network available for GreenfieldProject entrepreneurs.

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