Proposal to Host the Annual GCEC Conference in Fall 2010

“IMPACT THROUGH NETWORKS”

Prepared by:

Professor Anthony Warren

Director, Farrell Center for Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship

The PennsylvaniaState University, USA

and

Professor Nikolaus Franke

Director, Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation
and Entrepreneurship Center Vienna

Vienna University for Economics and Business, Austria

Executive Summary

We propose the theme “impact through networks” for the 2010 GCEC conference. The conference will be co-hosted with the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Institute from the Vienna University of Economics and Business. This collaboration brings two major benefits. First, recognition of the global nature of our organization and second, bringing in specific expertise in analyzing and stimulating networked interaction to our community. We will use network tools to engage all members in the design of the agenda, and to maximize the value of social interactions, before, during and post the conference. Our research on the “conference of the future” indicates that social networking tools will extend the value of location based activities. The collaboration with the group in Vienna will enable us to provide an extremely valuable and memorable few days, but also to use GCEC’s combined entrepreneurial skills to explore the future of conferences and more effectively spread the annual conference’s impact throughout the year.

The location offers award winning facilities in a park like campus, surrounded by a lively town and beautiful countryside with many attractions which we have built into the program as part of the social networking model. With everything for the conference within walking distance, we can maximize time for dialog and idea exchange.

The administration of Penn State has identified entrepreneurship as a corner-stone for its future, and as such, has earmarked funds for the support of this conference. We also anticipate funding support from our enormous alumni and corporate network.

Contents

1. Backgroundp3

2. Philosophyp 3

3. Conference Theme “Impact Through Networks”.P4

4. The Programp6

5. Hostsp12

6. Facilitiesp14

7. Budgetp16

  1. Background:

This proposal is a follow-up from the original “expression of interest” document submitted in October, 2008. Specifically it is for hosting the annual GCEC conferencein 2010 at Penn State, together with one of the largest Entrepreneurship Centers in Europe, the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (E&I) from the Vienna University for Economics and Business.

The reason for proposing this co-hosting arrangement is to provide GCEC a truly international perspective thereby supporting the recent change from NCEC to GCEC.We hope that such a format will become a model for future conferences.

Universities in Europe face somewhat different challenges from the US and, as such, have created unique programs to meet their stakeholders’ needs. We believe that a GCEC forum for exchange of experiences across national boundaries can provide rich insights on entrepreneurship within a global economy while broadening exposure to new ideas and program structures. We would hope that such a forum will also lead to more exchange of faculty and students, as well as richer funding and research opportunities.

2. Philosophy:

As an organization of practitioners rather than pure academics, our past conferences have been refreshingly open with an atmosphere of collegiality and willingness to help each other. However, we observe that as we have grownthere is a tendencyto revert to a more traditional conference format centered around formal presentations of papers rather than intensive, and personal interchanges. Formal paper sessions are more appropriately served at the NCIIA and USASBE venues. As leaders of entrepreneurship centers, perhaps one of our tasks should be exploring new ways to make conferences more productive both for our own benefit and the academic community in general. The real value of meeting after all is reflected by this quote[1]:

“… conferences are only partially about content. More important than the content—and after six months, usually much more memorable—are the opportunities for collaborative learning, for networking and relationship-building, and for developing new research or funding opportunities that emerge from personal interactions. It’s the social context of the experience—not simply the content—that energizes a conference and makes it worth the effort and expense.”

In this spirit, therefore, we have chosen a theme that emphasizes the value of networking, both within GCEC and beyond, and propose a program which is heavily directed towards interactivity, networking and greater involvement of all members before, during and after the conference. Achieving these goals will require us to push the boundaries a little regarding the use of some new tools for planning and managing a more fluid event – but that, of course, is what entrepreneurs do!

3. Conference Theme - “Impact through Networks”:

3.1 Context. GCEC has grown from its early days of a few members into a large cohort of over 250 members from largely North America but gradually extending around the world.This chart illustrates the dramatic rise in the number of E-ship centers over the last ten years.[2]

Figure 1: Growth of GCEC Membership over the Last 10 Years.

The intellectual power harnessed within the organization is ready to make a major impact on not only entrepreneurship but education and wealth creation in general. However, in keeping with much of higher education, we are continually short of resources and we are certainly not generating enough qualified faculty, whether tenured or not, to fulfill our declared destiny without rethinking how we effectively leverage our shared resources.We are also still somewhat labeled as a “bête noir” of disciplines, often struggling to find an appropriate home within the traditional structure of academic departments and colleges. Meanwhile, as seen in the following chart, within the Academy of Management, Innovation and entrepreneurship are proportionately two of the fastest growing divisions – a trend not yet fully accepted however within our educational institutes. [3]

The 2010 conference will focus on ways that GCEC can impact more people, more programs, and more economies in more places through greater cooperation through existing and future networks. The agenda will build on themes and experiences from earlier conferences.

Figure 2: The Emergence of Entrepreneurship and Innovation as Academic Fields.

3.2. Networks. There are a surprisingly large number of networks within which GCEC members engage for mutual benefit.

  • The primary one, of course, is composed of the current membership. This conference is intended to both grow this network internationally and to enhance the benefits of collaboration.
  • Each member is already embedded within several valuable networks which may include:

-Academic faculty across their own institutions

-Local Economic Development organizations

-Regional incubators, small firms, angel and VC investing groups

-Regional, national and international university collaboratives

-Alumni

-Corporations as sponsors, hirers, advisors and donors

-K-12 programs

-Memberships of other academically affiliated organizations.

-Etc. Etc.

The program is designed to highlight and explore these networks and how they can benefit all members whether they have been established for many years and are just starting an entrepreneurship center.

4. The Program.

4.1 Program Design – Engagement of Members.

Ours will be “an agenda in-the-making”. We have decided not to lay-out in detail the actual topics for the individual work-shops, sessions and social networking events. We have considered the agendas of past conferences and propose to take the best parts of those and attempt to improve upon them.We have witnessed a number of techniques used to maximize the experiences and interchanges that occur in what is a very short time-span – just two days. These have included parallel sessions, repeated sessions, plenary sessions, etc. each with their own pros and cons. We have also considered how we might more effectively use the beginning and end slots – Thursday and Saturday pm. – which have been rather “soft” in the past.

In order to maximize the value to all participants we will design the program elements based upon the specific interests and needs of participants. This will be accomplished in the following steps:

a)Creation of a planning web-site with social networking tools immediately after the Rice Conference.

b)Listing suggested session topics with a request for members to add their preferred topics.

c)Performing a short on-line survey to determine the most wanted topics for sessions.

d)Using modeling techniques developed by Dr. [PT1]Philipp Tuertscher in Vienna to map “clusters of interest” and themes in order to maximize workshop attendance and minimize overlaps.

e)Once the topics have been finalized, we will invite short papers or presentations on these topics from all members which will be submitted in outline at least two months before the conference. We will use peer review to select the most appropriate papers to fit the participants expressed needs. These will be hosted on the conference portalprior to the actual conference.

f)We will create social groups based on their indicated topics of interest, so that they can review, interact and prepare for the sessions that best fit their personal interests.

g)In this way, formal presentation time will be minimized to a few minutes only, allowing much more time for valuable interaction in Q&A and comment periods which universally are considered to be the most valuable part of the sessions.

h)Members can join specific social interest groups and continue interactions post-conference.

Members will be able to participate in designing the program by listing keywords describing their e-ship related interests. The modeling techniques developed by the Vienna group can be used to create a network representation of potential topics for conference sessions based on the preferred topics suggested by conference members. In addition to identifying topics of general interest and specialized sub-themes, it will be possible to map how the various topics are related to one another, a feature that is a significant advantage of this approach.

We will encourage participants to select keywords that indicate solutions our community is looking for rather than selecting keywords describing the current or prior work of participants. A map of conference topics based on these keywords will help the community to identify open questions that are of general interest to our community and will facilitate intense discussion about how to address the most challenging problems the e-ship community is confronting today. As an example of the mapping technique, the following figure shows how the different topics in entrepreneurship are related and their relative importance based on research work over the last fifteen years. Of course, the GCEC map will be rather less crowded due to the rather smaller sample of participants.

Figure 3: Map of major e-ship topics based on 15 years e-ship research

In order to stimulate members to participate in designing the program, we will list some topics that lie broadly within the theme of the conference.Such as:

  • How can web-based social networks be used to enhance programs?
  • How can e-ship education gain more academic integrity?
  • How can international collaborations enhance programs?
  • Can we develop a mentoring system whereby the larger, more established centers can actively help embryonic, and smaller centers become established and grow?
  • How can educators embed relevant academic research into their courses and programs?
  • How can we scale models for outreach?
  • Can courses be developed that are easily transportable to other disciplines and schools?
  • How can we use network theories and pedagogies to maximize learning?
  • What are ways of using technology/rich media to scale teaching and learning across a university?
  • How can we leverage networks of alums, angels, venture capitalists?
  • Can we share deal flow and investment syndication for student managed venture funds?
  • Are there better mechanisms for joint funding of programs?
  • What opportunities are there for collaboration between centers internationally?
  • How can centers enhance K-12 e-ship education through outreach?

4.2 Plenary Sessions.

We plan two formal plenary sessions in addition to the meal-time meetings.

4.2.1 Friday morning:After the brief formal introductions, the theme will be “similarities and differences between E-ship centers internationally and what opportunities might these offer”. We plan to have three speakers, each having an experience in at least two international locations. This session will be led by the faculty of the Viennese Center,Professors Franke and Tuertscher from Vienna. Both have experiences in several environments, the former at MIT and the latter at St. Gallen and Penn State. We will invite speakers who have had experience working in Asian markets. Each will address opportunities for collaboration, sharing of resources, and suggest ideas that could be used in North America. They will also present the findings of the mapping exercise described above.

4.2.2. Saturday, post lunch. The second plenary session will be immediately after lunch, and will focus on covering the key points of the conference, specific ongoing intra-conference initiatives by identified teams that emerge from the virtual and actual social networks that have formed. Prior to the conference we will ask for one volunteer for each major theme to act as correspondents and report on the key points in their arena.

4.3.Structured Network Opportunities.

In reviewing past conferences, we plan to incorporate several of the activities that seemed to work well in the past.These include:

  • Thursday afternoon, a time slot that has not been used to advantage, as participants arrive for registration, we will have a poster session where summaries of the sessions will be posted. This will enable participants to determine easily which sessions they might wish to attend and create an opportunity to start dialogs prior to the more formal sessions. We will also invite student e-teams to participate in this session as student/faculty interaction in past conferences has been highly regarded.This student input will be managed by Penn State’s colleges of Engineering and Computer Science as well as the Viennese Center. Snacks will be available for this “flexi-event”.
  • Thursday Evening, social networking soiree, with hot and cold “finger food” and open bar. We would like this time to extend rather longer than in the past, so we will make sure that it is in a space that is supportive of more sustained networking discussions.
  • Friday Lunch will be at a venue on campus with an invited speaker.We have several in mind but the final choice will be have to be made nearer the date of course.Penn State has the largest active alumni network of any University, and we can tap into this for an appropriate speaker.
  • Friday Evening - restaurant groups. We have earmarked several excellent restaurants offering a range of cuisines that have private rooms to be set aside for our use. We will use the social networking interest groups already formed on the portal to organize “interest topic” dinners in these venues.This seemed to be highly successful in Syracuse and we have an ideal environment to repeat this function.
  • Saturday pm, normally viewed as a time to relax, has become dead-time.Therefore we plan to have a selection of “mini-excursions” in the area that can appeal to different groups. Each of these will be led by a student guide, and will take advantage of the many unique locales near to the campus.Participants will be able to sign-up for these prior to the conference. The excursions will function both as a time to relax but also to continue networking dialogs stimulated by the more formal sessions. Among the choices will be:
  • Mount Nittany to enjoy the mountain views, trails and perhaps a quick cocktail
  • Penn’s Cave, a boat-trip through large limestone caverns
  • Railroad Museum – celebrates the once all-powerful Pennsylvania Railroad
  • Historic Victorian Bellefonte, County Seat with grand parks, architecture and welcoming watering holes
  • Nine Holes of Golf on one of the many local courses
  • Fly-fishing in Spruce or Spring Creeks – favorite haunts of ex-presidents!
  • Ridge Gliding
  • Belleville Amish Market
  • Palmer Art Museum
  • The Arboretum
  • A brew-pub to watchfootball games
  • For those more energetic, all of the sports facilities can be made available including gyms, tennis courts, rac quetball, swimming, ice skating etc.
  • And for those less energetic, we will host a comfortable lounge for chess, bridge, reading, or just hanging out.
  • Saturday evening networking soiree and banquet will be at one of the many great venues that we can choose locally ranging from a mountain top inn, a converted grist mill in the grand Victorian town center of Bellefonte, the luxurious president’s suite in the largest football stadium in the nation, the art museum, a lakeside environmental center, or in one of the many banqueting facilities near campus. The entertainment prior to the dinner will be by students from our musical theater program, a launch-pad for Broadway hopefuls – always a hit!
  • Based on feed-back from previous conferences, we plan to retain the “self-less self-promotion” presentations, but rather than having them all shown in a plenary session, they will run continuously in an area close to the break-out buffets, so that they can be viewed at any time. The five best will be selected by a peer committee for viewing at the end of the first plenary session.
  • Throughout the conference we will host a hospitality suite in one of the bars on campus, or in a close-by walkable down-town venue.

The following chart outlines our proposed program illustrating the breakdown between different classes of activities.