Usha Srinivasan, Director of Market Intelligence
Moderator James Sbrolla said it best: It figures that a panel of three brilliant women would be participating in a session on market intelligence. Last month’s “Growing Your Business” session hosted by the RIC Centre and OCETA saw Usha Srinivasan, Director of Market Intelligence at MaRS, Christine Konig of Konig & Consultants and Isabel Alexander, founder of Phancorp Inc., discuss the topic of “Using Market Intelligence as your Strategic Weapon”.
Networking: The roots of your resilient business
Is our success in business as dependent on networking as we think? The answer is “yes”.
That seemed to be the general consensus at the CIBC Presents Entrepreneurship 101 session on December 17th. An interesting aspect to this is: if you polled 100 people 15 years ago and asked them what had made them successful in their chosen career, perhaps 1-5 people might have said being a part of “the old boy’s network” or meeting the right people at the right time. They would not have said that networking is a strategy — a learned skill that is essential to growing your business or getting a job.
Winning team at BioCamp 2009
Sixty 25- to 35-year-olds from all over the world traveled to Cambridge, MA, to learn, debate and network with leading biotechnology executives. In my wildest dreams, I never would have thought that I’d be attending camp again at this ripe old age… but that’s exactly what I did. On October 26-30, I participated in the Novartis International Biotechnology Leadership Camp—or , as we participants affectionately called it, “BioCamp”.
BioCamp participants were postgraduate students from 27 countries, only three of whom were selected from Canada. Just getting into BioCamp was a challenge in itself: over 3,000 students applied! Most of the participants at this event had competed at a BioCamp in their home country, then been hand-picked by event organizers to participate in the International BioCamp (for example, the European BioCamp).
Thanks to everyone who attended my session last Wednesday. I tried to provide practical advice for entrepreneurs launching or participating in social enterprises. I talked about the space and my top 10 lessons learned. If you haven’t seen the lecture you can view it here.
I believe we had around 70 people in attendance – which speaks to the momentum building in the social enterprise sector. And it seemed like my messages resonated – the number of questions after the presentation and offers of people volunteering (for Better The World) were overwhelming.
I would like to comment on a few questions that were brought up repeatedly.
What happens when you bring a room full of successful, dynamic and passionate women together to talk about innovation? They discuss how the workplace has changed in the last 40 years, why women are still dealing with a gender divide at work, and how the future of innovation in science, technology and the arts requires women.
Women Piloting Innovation, a panel discussion held at MaRS in partnership with Nightwood Theatre last week, set out to find out how we can build an innovation economy that harnesses the capacity and creative energy of women.
