They talk about building teams in the business world but nothing is quite so ruthless as building teams in the sporting world. Cambridge Rugby Union Football Club let go around half the first team squad at the end of last season and have been recruiting hard for the new season.
Karl Rudzki has signed from Northampton Saints and has joined the club‘s PR consultants, Quite Great of Shelford, Cambridge, UK. It must be tough getting the body into shape for the season and the squad is already training three times each week. Of course, you do not need a budge in sport you have a league table from which there is no hiding.
It will take great leadership to keep this squad working together – a skill some entrepreneurial teams in Cambridge need to learn!
Image via WikipediaProfessor Arnoud de Meyer is Director of the Judge Business School in Cambridge, UK. He joined from Insead three years ago and has lifted the Judge into the top echelon of the business school world by concentrating on building strong links with his host university – Cambridge. Apparently most other business schools want to go it alone and distance themselves from their host. European business schools, Insead in Fontainbleau and ISE in Barcelona are removed from clusters and Harvard Business School tries to keep its independence.
When I showed him the illustrations for Equity Fingerprint, the business plan resource, he was impressed. Now we need to follow his 3R mantra with the NESTA project. “Is it revealing, is it rigorously done and is it relevant – that is, can we translate it into the classroom? The importance of practical research is linked to the second area which we are building on – executive education. Through our research we want to influence the world of business, and executive education is a way of diffusing our ideas to a much larger audience than one would reach simply through MBA programmes.”
Equity Fingerprint will be rigorously done by Lancaster University Management School as part of the NESTA funded project. We know it is revealing and then it will be relevant. It will go global – well, that is the dream.
Image by Getty Images via DaylifeIn the last few days I have experienced three different types of silence: walking on my own in the hills; a thirty six hour silent retreat and visiting an old lady in a nursing home.
Walking on the hills can be a solitary affair but you are always busy watching your step, thinking of your route and there is always the sound of the wind. On the top of the hill you have the reward of the view and the feeling of achievement. However no picture can “bottle” the experience and help you share it with your friends. Walking with John Morrell of WalkingWays was different -someone to talk to, someone to guide you on the way but so difficult to stay silent when you are walking with such a knowledgeable person.
St Francis House at Hemingford Grey offers retreats to groups of people from various churches. I went with 14 people from St Bene’t’s Church in Cambridge, UK for a thirty six hour silent retreat. We arrived on Friday afternoon and stayed until after lunch on the Sunday. The time is organised and the retreat was led by the Rev’d Dr James Gardom of Pembroke College, Cambridge. It is a very special experience sitting either in the house or in the wonderful garden with people you know and being silent. A very special type of silence and different from sitting in silence in a church with other people.
The third type of silence is the type that falls on us as we age; moved from our homes with most of our friends and family no longer alive into a home for old people. Sitting in a room alone, just sitting. Here I go to break the silence of a very special person but all she really wants is to be back with her friends. Perhaps the first two silences will help me when my time comes to experience the third – I can only hope so.
So reach out and visit someone on their own and break their silence if only for a short time. I suppose the Internet helps as people can communicate. I know someone who is ill and the Internet has given them a new role in their community so technology and the products of the Cambridge Cluster can and do help.
Image via WikipediaCambridge Temperature Concepts has launched the website for it’s first product DuoFertility. So if you are one of the 1 in 7 couples who are struggling to start a family, sign up for the trials, whilst you are considering IVF. DuoFertility uses a tiny recorder stuck onto your arm to measure your temperature – see the site for more details. All you have to do is place a hand held reader over the device, watch the dial and get in the mood. It is a serious problem to many people and let us hope that 1 + 1 + DuoFertility = 3. Let us hope that it gets the angel investors in the mood too!
Disclosure: I am an angel investor in Cambridge Temperature Concepts
Anglia Ruskin University students in Cambridge are working with Philip Baddeley of Equity Fingerprint and John Grant of Ninetiles Networks Ltd on research for their dissertations. Philip and John are developing business applications of their hi-tech innovations.
They are assisted by Robert Jones, Programme Leader of Anglia Ruskin’s part-time MBA in Cambridge.
We are collaborating with Geoff Jones whose assistance is invaluable.
See cambridgemba for more news, including the success of Anglia Ruskin’s student team in the Universities Business Challenge semi-final at the Royal Navy Museum in Portsmouth on 29 January 2008.
The number of viewers are building. Who will build the most viewers fastest? Do they need to raise funds to reach larger audiences? Will they need more teams? How do you duplicate a star? How do you scale these business? The winners will be the geeks providing the software.
For the first time you will see the faces and hear the voices of all those people who really change the world. No longer are we stuck watching the self-promoting politicians – bring on the geeks!
Will they ask the entrepreneurs about their Equity Fingerprints?
Robin Preston is the BBC’s business editor and his blog, Preston’s Picks, has a million readers. Would you pick him to be a great broadcaster and writer? Well, he comes from an intellectual hot-house (father Lord Preston, economic guru of Queen Mary College, London and mother works in the NHS) so you could take a good guess. What about Pele? His father was, take a guess, a centre forward and the family football crazy. Early research at CMI shows the one of the best indicators of a successful entrepreneur is if the father was an entrepreneur.
I guess it is all about nurture and nature. I remember a bank manager saying that you can tell if a person is an entrepreneur when you shake their hand. I offered a wager if he could pick out the successful entrepreneurs in the room but he was not keen to take me on.
Professor Fogg of Stanford University runs a course on Facebook applications. Is this real science and pushing back the boundaries of knowledge or a crucial part of encouraging the next generation of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley? Read on if you are less interested in knowledge and want a job. Such skills would help you up your wedge in the equity split of your next start-up.
Techcrunch attended the course and said Blake Commagere, ace facebook developer, “discussed how many corporations are banging on the doors of Facebook developers because these companies need engineers who can create an applications for them that build brand awareness. Apparently, these companies are so desperate for talent that they are willing to pay large sums of money and give developers complete ownership of the applications they produce. His overall point was that developers need not currently worry about going out and doing things on their own, because their talents are in short supply.
The consulting firm catcap asked 250 investors about WEB 2.0. 2/3 of them believes into a long- term period of WEB 2.0. This means that WEB 2.0 takes a big advantage over his competitors: Gaming 44%, Mobile-Internet 38%, Internet-TV 17%
Beneficial for start-ups; 80% of the investors says that they want to see the start-ups at business-plan challenges to contact and communicate with them. Throughout this they arrange 60% of business relations.
The opportunity for start-ups to get money from investors increased during last year and it will increase this year again.
Also Venture Lounge brings investors and start-ups and business companies together.
Press release “Cambridge, UK – 23 Jan 2008 –Cambridge Temperature Concepts Limited (CTC) today announced securing £375,000 in private investment to aid product development of their novel ovulation detector – DuoFertility. The investment is syndicated between the Cambridge Angels, Cambridge Capital Group, and members of the Downing Enterprise board. Founded in 2005 by 4 post-graduate students at the University of Cambridge, CTC are now based in new premises at the Cambridge Science Park and plan to complete their development programme over the next 4 months, with trials beginning in Q2 2008.The first product release of DuoFertility is scheduled for Q3 2008.”
From his talk at CUE, we know that Dr Shamus Husheer, CEO, owned half of the original equity split but what happened after this round? As an investor, it will be interesting to see of they stay “in the family way” (ie stay with the current investors) or go to VCs to drive the growth.
