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Entrepreneurs to help Cancer Research UK beat cancer

openventures1I recently met one of the team behind the Open Ventures Challenge in aid of Cancer Research UK.

Their radical idea is to apply open innovation principles to venture creation, with the aim of building three new activities which will each generate £10 million to help beat cancer. They can be independent business ventures, new ventures for an existing company or a new venture for Cancer Research UK to run themselves.

This is a brave experiment from Cancer Research UK as it combines the use of social media and ethical capitalism. As they say on their website, they don’t know what will come out of it, but “look forward to seeing what you come up with”. Could it be a “Body Shop for Cancer”? Could it be the next “Race for Life”? Could it be a way to remove £10m from the cost of research?

The Challenge runs from November 2008 to June 2009 but already has 32 suggestions.

To join in with this fascinating experiment you have to agree to the following:
1. to give honest and open feedback
2. to act in good faith at all times
3. to treat all community members with respect and courtesy

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Make a Wave Awards – closing date 12 December

unltd_logoThe second round of the Make a Wave Awards 2008-2009 from Ogunte and UnLtd (The Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs) closes on 12 December Open to Women!

ogunteSo if you are a woman with  “bold, fresh and ground-breaking ideas to help solve issues emerging in the communities of their choice, in the UK”, why not apply for an award of up to £1,000?

They are made to women in the UK who can show that a very small amount of money, paired up with a resourceful brain, can be used to make a difference.

“We are looking for ideas that fit with the values of UnLtd’s mission to reach out and unleash the energies of people who can transform the world in which they live. UnLtd call these people social entrepreneurs.

Your ideas need to be aligned with Oguntê’s Women in Social Leadership vision: inspiration, entrepreneurship, networking, confidence, and sustainability.”

DOWNLOAD SPECS Make A Wave Award – (Word Doc

DOWNLOAD APPLICATION FORM 2008-2009 (Word Doc)

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Bravely Going Global at the British Library

global_entrepreneurship_weekI’m just back from our ‘Inspiring Entrepreneurs’ event Small companies, global ambitions with Brent Hoberman,, co-founder of lastminute.com, launched online interiors site mydeco; Asif Rangoonwala, founder of baked good suppliers Eurobuns; Dawn Gibbins, founder of Flowcrete flooring and the Barefoot lifestyle brands, and Richard Woods a co-founder of DIY Kyoto. who sell the ‘wattson’ energy monitor.

Once again the chair Matthew Rock managed the tricky task of giving everyone a say and finding time for lots of good questions from the audience.

Highlights of the evening were:

  • Noticing how punctual the audience was tonight compared to our event on Ethical Fashion. Something to do with the credit crunch or the nature of those attending.
  • Meeting both existing clients and entrepreneurs such as Ed Wray, designer of the BarbeSkew who had some revealing insights into the entertainment that is Dragon’s Den.
  • Hearing how important it is to understand how your product benefits your customer and also their customers.
  • Thinking of sections of a larger company as kingdoms, and giving the ‘kings’ freedom to manage without interference.
  • Employing mavericks as managers (that one came from Dawn Gibbins, who was an amazing speaker. So much enthusiasm, energy and honesty.
  • Meeting an entrepreneurial librarian, Jennifer Smith the co-founder of OneIS.
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Enterprise week 2009 preview

enterprise-week-logoNext week will be the third Enterprise Week the Business & IP Centre has been involved with.The first coincided with the my first blogging activities (Enterprise Week 2006).

And it is going to be another busy week in the Centre with lots of events going on as you can see below:

Monday 17 November
10.00 – 12.00 Going Global
13.00 – 17.00 Knowing your Market
14.30 – 16.30 A Beginner’s Guide to Intellectual Property

Tuesday 18 November
9.30 – 13.30 Business Plan Services – the Perfect Business Plan
10.00 – 12.00 Rasheed Ogunlaru – Making it as an Entrepreneur
10.00 – 16.00 ideas21 – Advice clinics on intellectual property
13.00 – 17.00 CENTA – Let’s Start Talking in Business
18.00 – 21.00 Striding Out – Celebrating Successful Social Entrepreneurs

Wednesday 19 November – Women’s Enterprise Day
10.30 – 13.30 Invention Intelligence – Female Inventors Rising to the Challenge
10.00 – 16.00 London Business Support Service – One-to-one advice sessions
14.00 – 17.00 Looking to go International?
18.15 – 21.00 Inspiring Entrepreneurs: Small Business, Global Ambitions

Thursday 20 November – Social Enterprise Day
10.00 – 13.00 Red Ochre: Starting a Social Enterprise
14.00 – 17.00 Red Ochre: Plugging the skills gap

Friday 21 November
10.00 – 12.00 Going Global
13.00 – 17.00 Knowing your Market
14.30 – 16.30 A Beginner’s Guide to Intellectual Property

I am particularly looking forward to hearing Brent Hoberman and Dawn Gibbins at our Inspiring Entrepreneurs: Small Business, Global Ambitions event on the Wednesday evening.

Brent Hoberman is one of Britain’s best-known entrepreneurs who, with co-founder Martha Lane Fox, built the iconic online travel site, lastminute.com, into an internationally successful business that was sold in 2005 to a US travel giant. In 2007, Brent launched interiors website mydeco.com.

Dawn Gibbins MBE is one of the UK’s most flamboyant and inspirational entrepreneurs, who built Flowcrete into a global business with offices in 30 countries. She is a former Veuve Clicquot Business Woman of the Year.

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SuperJam Tea Parties helping to tackle loneliness

Great to see that one of our most memorable Inspiring Entrepreneurs speakers Fraser Doherty (the teenager behind the Super Jam brand) has been doing his bit to help with the growing issue of loneliness for elderly people.

This problem has had quite a bit of media coverage in recent weeks such as this item from BBC reporter Tim Muffett.

super_jamFraser has introduced tea parties as a way of bring lonely elderly people together:

“after months of preparation, we today hosted our first of many tea parties for the elderly. About thirty guests came along to Sighthill community center and we all enjoyed a great laugh for a couple of hours and the delicious cakes and scones that were kindly donated by Waitrose. Alan from  Contact the Elderly  also came along and entertained us all with games, a couple of quizzes and a hilarious poem.”

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A credit crunch silver lining?

I got the day off to a depressing start on Monday by listening to a recent Radio 4 In Business podcast on the credit crunch.

It consisted of a live discussion with the following experts:

  • Keith Clarke, Chief Executive, Atkins Engineering
  • Jon Moulton, Founder, Alchemy Partners
  • Julie Meyer, Chief Executive, Ariadne Capital
  • Bob McKee, Chief Economist, Independent Strategy
  • George Cooper, Author, The Origin of Financial Crises and Fund Manager, Alignment Investors
  • John Kay, Economic Commentator

Although John Kay was the least pessimistic in terms of how bad we can expect the economy to get, the only person who had anything positive to contribute was Julie Meyer, the co-founder of First Tuesday, who spoke at our Desperately seeking finance event in April. She felt that the economic downturn would lead to an increase in small business startups, particularly one person companies. Certainly my 16 years working in the City of London leads me to believe that many of the recent (and expected) redundant staff will welcome the opportunity to explore more satisfying and valuable career opportunities, even if they are less materially rewarding.

[youtube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=3uuzC5MEAHY]

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The Future is not what it used to be

Went to a fascinating Sir Kenneth Cork Management Lecture last night at the Octagon (part of Queen Mary, University of London in the Mile End Road).

The event was organised by the London Branch of the Chartered Management Institute and featured Brian Baldock currently Chairman of Mencap.

In his wide-ranging talk Brian covered the changes to technology, society, communications, business and finance which have brought us to our present state. He explored how once cutting edge Business Models are now universally outdated; why corporate re-engineering, re-organisation and cost-reduction processes are all time and effort wasted; why organisation structures and processes are generally not fit for purpose.

His role model companies were Google who are focussed on creating services their customers want, and Walmart who constantly reduce the price of products for their customers.

Amongst a long list of suggestions for what business needs to do to become competitive in the future were the following highlights:

  • Eliminate committees
  • Replace trainers with coaches
  • Create a culture of ‘restless dissatisfaction’
  • Become customer and consumer obsessed
  • Think the unthinkable
  • Recruit mavericks
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The Secret of Success: How to be a Start-Up Star

I am grateful to my colleague Julie Boadilla for this report.

I thought this event was a very productive session. Having done a bit of networking on the night of the event, I noticed that most of the attendees were undergraduate students. There were four presenters who explained how they set up their businesses and gave tips on how to become successful, they also outlined how they overcame challenges and obstacles they encountered.

The first speaker was Adam Goodyer who’s business  Concert Live produces live CD’s of music concerts within 15 minutes of the end of the event, so fans can re-live the concert experience. He decided that rather than rely on patents to protect his invention he would compete by being better than his competitors. Despite no previous music industry experience, the company is going from strength to strength, and last year generated revenue of over £1million. His tip was to always be aware of the little things. He didn’t arrange for local banking facilities in the early days and so ended up in the uncomfortable situation of having to take a bin bag with £65,000 in cash to his local branch.

Tricia Weener is co-founder of Intelligent Marketing, a creative marketing agency that achieved a £2million turnover last year, and represents clients such as Honda, Woolworth’s and Guinness. Tricia and her co-founder won this year’s Women in Business category at the Startup Awards. She recommended not to be afraid of employing people who are better at you.

Rhodri Ferrier of Bulldog Grooming Products left samples of his natural moisturiser for each person in the audience. The company was named “Sainsbury’s Small Branded Supplier of the Year 2007/08”.

We also had Dan Cobley, who is marketing director, UK Ireland and Benelux for Google.

I thought it was interesting and informative in a way that they explained what they did right and wrong. Also they were honest and admitted that they made mistakes along the way.

The 45 minute questions and answer session was equally good and overall I greatly enjoyed the event.
Julie Boadilla

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Business & IP Centre minor media star

We are very proud of Jeremy O’Hare our minor media star in the Business & IP Centre team. His first appearance was last summer on the BBC’s Working Lunch show.

They came in to the Centre to film a ten minute slot on our wonderful and unique free sources of information and interviewed a couple of our ‘success stories’. As well as finding out how they had used our information, the journalists wanted to interview a member of our reference team. Jeremy volunteered and did an excellent job, suppressing his understandable nerves to give a clear but enthusiastic summary of our service.

In fact Jeremy’s appearance was so successful the rest of the team had to deal with several weeks of answering phone enquirers who specifically asked for Jeremy to assist them with their business information needs.

Since then he has played a staring role in our award winning interactive annual report.

Last week we received a call from the Working Lunch show saying they wanted to come in and get three British Library staff to review the latest batch of E-readers. They wanted to know if the ‘professionals’ thought we were ready to usher in the era of digital books. You can watch for yourself to see what their views were.

Once again Jeremy was pressed into action and once again acquitted himself excellently.

Who knows where this media career will lead!

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Our future world is Blue, Green or Orange

Just back from the ebic 2008 conference organised by TFPL, and exhausted from listening to so many speakers and ideas (plus networking late into the night). This year we spent an afternoon brainstorming the implications for the information and knowledge profession of the Pricewaterhouse Coopers‘ scenario worlds of the future, Managing tomorrow’s people: The future of work to 2020. This predicted three very different possibilities and gave each a colour:

The Blue World: Corporate is King: Big company capitalism rules as organisations continue to grow and individual preferences trump beliefs about corporate social responsibility.

The Green World: Companies Care: Social responsibility dominates the corporate agenda and concerns about demographic changes, climate and sustainability become the key business drivers.

The Orange World: Small is Beautiful: Companies begin to breakdown into collaborative networks of smaller organisations and specialisation dominates the world economy.

Our task was to attempt to answer the following three questions:

1. What significant developments/events/trends that will impact on KIM (knowledge and information management) activity can we expect/anticipate across the forecasting time-line in this world?
2. What KIM activity would ensure success in this world?
3. What KIM roles and skills would be of value to organisations in this world?

The outputs from these discussions were recorded and I am looking forward to seeing the conclusions in the next few weeks.