In Cambridge, content is king. Scruffy academics in macs vie with gawky geeks in dayglo cycle shorts for the prize of the most unlikely person to change the world - until they open their mouth and start explaining their idea.
Wisdom has built her house,
she has hewn her seven pillars.
She has slaughtered her animals, she has mixed her wine,
she has also set her table.
She has sent out her servant-girls, she calls
from the highest places in the town,
"You that are simple, turn in here!"
To those without sense she says,
"Come, eat of my bread
and drink of the wine I have mixed.
Lay aside immaturity, and live,
and walk in the way of insight."
Fortunately, we have a brilliantly well-presented team of ladies organizing events here in Cambridge Network, who wisely do all those things that make meetings rather more effective. Stuff like putting up events a good time in advance on a website that receives 7,000 visitors and hands out 50,000 page views a day. Stuff like chasing speakers for presentations and getting them up in PDF form on the web page of the event in case anyone wants to tweet about it and link to some real content. Stuff like making sure that there are refreshments and a good list of attendees with their interests in the particular topic being discussed nicely laid out. Stuff that most other organizations just don't do.
Head of the team is Louise Rushworth. Louise holds the forward schedule for the next year or so - our Special Interest Groups are mostly planned through 2011 now. She did a brilliant job last Friday of taking new and prospective members through the upcoming schedule, a group of around 45 people from Audio Analytic, Badenoch and Clark, CADStudios, Creactive Design, Encocam, Enterprise Consulting, Evolve Organisation Development, Fenners Chambers, Ideas by Eden, Judge Business School, Medical Research Council, Metail, NHS East of England, NW Brown Group, Obsidian Consulting LLP, Orion Automation, PraxisUnico, Safer Business Associates, SHAZAM Analytics, SJPR, The Inspired Group, University of East Anglia. Louise looks after theSpecial Interest Groups in Defence & Security, Developing World, Entrepreneurship and Open Meetings. Louise organizes lots of other stuff too, like the Corporate Gateway which gives technology scouts and R&D directors 1-to-1 meetings on the topics of their choice over two days with the best and brightest (and nicely presented!) minds in Cambridge.
Andrea Mitchell actually organized the event - she sorts out all the Making the Most of Membership sessions, along with our brilliant Consumer Products, Finance Director and Cafe Networking SIGs.
Emma Southern turned out a great crowd last Wednesday to talk about Business Intelligence. IT and operations experts from Advantage Europe, Andrew Webster, Anglia Business Solutions, AVEVA Solutions, Beacon Computer Technology, Bridge Partners, Cambridge Financial Partners LLP, Contact Edge CRM, Convergys, Craft Way Consulting, Crucible Technology, Elegant Microweb UK, Farmor Quince, GE Energy, Graveley Associates, Itica, Judge Business School, Management Process Systems Limited (MPS), Microsoft Research, Paribus, Risk-Capital Research & Technology, Safer Business Associates, Signify, Softwerx, Synalytic, TTP, Voyage Manager and Zapp. Personally I wound up chatting to the Microsoft Research presenter about the French and Anglo-Saxon innovation systems. He teaches at a Grande Ecole, and talked about how concerned he was about the gap between academia and commerce in France. I cited an ex-Grande Ecole mate who went straight from being Sarcozy's chief of staff to performing the same function for the head of Orange France Telecom, but then we agreed that was probably better described as moving between different government functions. Emma looks after Healthcare, Cleantech, and Sales and Marketing SIGs too.
Lastly, our brilliant young Russian intern, Kate Parashina, did a brilliant job last week of pulling together an audience of around 80 Chinese national students who were interested in hearing about Unilever's plans to expand their Shanghai R&D centre. It was a big help to Kate to listen to Jim Crilly (who heads up Unilever Colworth) because she is working closely with Louise to identify academics and companies who are interested in emerging markets, and many of the issues that Unilever's Chinese researchers need to consider relate to precisely those issues of developing waste handling and redesigning products to be less resource-hungry as emerging consumers rapidly move to being 80% of all consumers by 2020. Again, I found the session fascinating myself - and when the kids were knocking back the Liptons Iced Tea on the weekend I could brag that I had met the man in charge!
Content really IS king in Cambridge. None of these sessions were generalised speed networking sessions for business people to sell low level services to one another. Each of them took months of effort to line up the right speakers, and to get three such sessions out in a single week is a testimony to the effectiveness of our events group. They fulfill our mission of bridging from the Universities to the region, from the region to the world.
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