Showing posts with label CECS and the City. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CECS and the City. Show all posts
Sunday, 31 July 2016
CECS and the City Episode 4: Entrepreneurship
The
stories of mega-million dollar businesses popping up out of someone’s garage
are becoming more and more common. They’re usually run by an unkempt high
school or college drop out with too much talent to be sitting around in
university lectures. Most start ups don’t begin this way, despite how the media
makes us feel (so please don’t drop out of university). However, as we move through the digital age,
more and more people have been inspired and encouraged to create something new
and enter the world of entrepreneurialism.
Through
channels like the Tech Launcher program at ANU, the CBR Innovation Network and
the Griffin Accelerator, there is a shift to an environment where innovation
and new ideas are nurtured and encouraged. QPay is a great example of this.
They started out of ANU as a software development company called Imagine Team.
Then QPay (focusing on bill sharing for students) sprang from this, and have now
expanded to be the best ticketing and administrative system for university
clubs and societies. These guys have picked up plenty of grants along the way
too!
So,
just in case this start-up craze is for you, I’ve put together some advice from
the conference that might point you in the right direction.
Earl
Valencia from the Science and Technology Advisory Council helps start ups in
the Philippines. His organisation provides financial, legal and advisory
support to innovators. He has seen thousands of proposals and supported
hundreds of them as they became businesses, so he has certainly got plenty of
experience in who makes it and who doesn’t.
So…which
ones do make it? He came up with a nice list of things for us. Invariably, the
most successful start-ups came from people who:
- Didn’t give up! They failed plenty of times, but they always asked for help.
- Have global ambition. These are people who believe that their idea should scale up in the future in a big way, not just remain a local business.
- Aren’t afraid to do the dirty work. This means being the one that builds that website or enters all that data. There are likely to be a lot of menial tasks on the way to success and you’re the only one who will care enough to do them.
- Know who they impact. The first question is: who is it that benefits from the product? Then this leads on to a million other questions that have to be answered about those people and their lives. A lot of start-ups make too many assumptions about these people and forget to take the time out to get to know them.
- Have a deeply meaningful vision. This has to be something that you believe in, and something that you can convince your investors to believe in too.
So
don’t overlook those 5 things!
Now
we turn to Yobie, the billionaire entrepreneur who has a gene fabricating
machine in his basement. Yeah, that’s not normal.
He
had all sorts of advice and interesting perspectives. A lot of these were only
applicable to those who already had a mini fortune (probably not you, sorry),
but some really important things came out that are applicable to all students,
not just those looking to create a start-up. Ready for another list of advice?
- Be prepared to pivot. This means you have to be flexible with your game plan. Paypal changed their business model 16 times. As you go on, you’ll learn more about the market, demand for certain products and the realities of the consumer world. QPay have done a great job of this as they saw the opportunity to get students signed up by moving into the world of university societies.
- Make sure you tell a story. Whether you’re crowdfunding or selling your product, he says half the job is telling stories. The best crowd funding efforts I’ve seen always have a great video, with a great story!
- If you want to do good, you have to be practical. If there’s one thing I learnt in Cambodia with Engineers Without Borders, it’s that without economics and business viability, humanitarian engineering doesn’t really work. The products or services that make the biggest impact in developing countries don’t usually come out of aid organisations. The best example is the mobile phone. It has made an absolutely huge impact in developing countries. It caught on because it was a marketable product that people were willing to invest in. Earl Valencia’s organisation sees this, which is why they are supporting business and innovation from locals in the Philippines as a way to create social change.
- The most important skill an undergraduate needs is…curiosity! So don’t bother practicing your MATLAB, maths, or CAD skills. The students who want to find out more about the world, try new things and ask the right questions are the ones who go places. This probably fits in with his idea that we won’t need programmers soon as computers will be able to do that for us. I don’t think that means we should stop learning, but it does mean we should make sure we have skills that focus on design and problem solving, not just the extremely technical, sometimes repetitive, work.
- Reply to your emails straight away. Perhaps the most boring piece of advice, but it’s my favourite. It’s all about doing things straight away and efficiently dealing with things as they come. It’ll help you to power through your day if nothing else.
So
there you have it. Nothing they’ve said is shocking. Advice from successful
people is rarely shocking and rarely that practical, but there’s a reason these
things stand out to them. It’s up to you to figure out how you can apply them
to your work.
Emily
Friday, 24 June 2016
CECS and the City Episode 2: SDG Number Five
CECS and the
City Episode 2: SDG Number Five
This is me doing me best to smile through the cold NY weather.
When
you get a group of really ambitious people together, it can be the perfect dose
of motivation for a young person. On day 2 of the conference we heard from some
women and men who had achieved a lot. There was Lord Dr Michael Hastings (Global
Head of Citizenship at KPMG), Senator Imani Duncan-Price from Jamaica, Jacques
Philippe Piverger (founder and CEO of the Soleil Group) and many more people
who were frustratingly successful and really eloquent speakers too.
We
spent the morning talking about the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
while it snowed outside (dogs were wearing snow boots to walk around the city!)
The SDGs are the 17 global targets released by the UN in 2015, and are the
successors to their Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Each of the 17 is
important on it’s own, but there’s a huge crossover and it would be hard to focus
on just one at a time.
Number
1 is a biggie: no poverty. If you’re pessimistic about this one, you might be
surprised to know that we’re halfway to eliminating poverty. Yep. That’s a huge
deal! It’s something we need to celebrate for sure. BUT, you wouldn’t stop
halfway, right? The following video from the UN is pretty awesome and makes
this point. It features some interesting facts plus some celebs like Usain Bolt
and Coldplay, I definitely recommend you take the 2 minutes to watch it.
Some
of my favourites are number 4 (quality education), 6 (clean water and
sanitation), and 17 (partnerships for the goals). Seventeen is important
because it makes people focus on doing things together, and that’s a really
nice (but also highly effective) way to go about it. The best part is that
under each of these goals are really specific targets that can be measured, so
they’re not just some vague areas of interest that the UN threw together, these
are some serious goals with serious targets.
Number
5 is gender equity. In the room of highly ambitious women, this one led to a
big discussion on equal pay, having more women CEOs and breaking that glass
ceiling. It was really interesting and, of course, really important to hear.
These women were very passionate about these issues and about creating
opportunities for women. But there was a
really powerful moment later in the morning that made us all take a huge step
back from this. In the middle of the fired
discussion, Lord Hastings said to us all “yes, these things are really
important, but there is this preoccupation with acquisition of position. We
need more than that. Girls need education, we need to eliminate poverty. Where
is the social justice for those who can’t get to the first base point? Let’s
start at the bottom and not the top”.
Damn.
We had all been so preoccupied with number 5 and how it related to ourselves,
but there are 16 other goals and billions of women on the planet that we were
ignoring. I realised that empowering women is essential to meeting all the
other goals, and women in developing countries need to be a huge part of number
5.
Jamaican
Senator, Imani Duncan, described it really nicely and gave me my take-away
message for the day in one line. She said “number five, gender equality, is the
thread that runs through all of the goals”.
It
was exactly the shift in perspective that I think we all needed.
Emily
Monday, 20 June 2016
CECS and the City Episode 1: Mentor Me.
Most
people agree that we need more women to start and stay in STEM fields,
especially engineering, computer science and maths. I definitely agree. I think
women, men, businesses and the world in general have a lot to benefit from
increased participation of women. One thing I spend a lot of time thinking about
is how many more? Is 50% realistic? Would a success story in Australia see
numbers increase by 5%? 10%?
I
don’t want to convince girls to do something they don’t want to do. But I do
want them to know more about STEM careers and feel empowered enough to take
those sorts of paths.
I’m
going to use engineering as my example here, because I have the stats and it’s
what I’ve experienced. But most of what I say applies to the physical sciences,
maths and computer science. Perhaps even especially to computer science!
ANU
engineering has just under 20% women in the undergraduate population, which is
pretty good compared to other Australian universities. In 2015, 14.4% of
Australian engineering undergraduate commencements were women [1]. So knowing
that ANU is doing a bit better than average, should we stop there? Hell no! MIT
has an undergraduate engineering population of 46% women [2], Brown has almost
40% [3], and there are many other great engineering colleges and universities
in the USA with numbers in the range of 30-45% [4]. So it’s definitely
realistic for us to bump those figures up so we can lead the Australian
statistics in the same way MIT is leading the USA’s.
So,
now that we’ve established that…what can we do?
As
we sat in the New York Academy of Science (NYAS) on the 40th floor of the World
Trade Centre overlooking the city scape, we heard about some really great
things happening in this space.
The
NYAS runs mentoring programs for high school students around the world,
scholarship programs for undergraduates, networking opportunities between women
of all ages and heaps of other things. All of their initiatives focus on the
long term. The 1000 girls, 1000 futures program is a 3-year online mentoring
program. They’re really showing what a big organisation can do with a little
funding!
Kimberley Bryant, set up Black Girls Code in the USA. It started out as a
bit of creativity for her daughter and her friends, and has now turned into a
program that transforms thousands of girls into creators of technology, not
just consumers of it. She showed us what one person can start, even when
they’re not intending to do so!
The
examples of awesome programs kept on going all day. It was pretty clear that they
all had one common element. Mentoring! It seemed to be the number one driver at
all stages. We need to provide mentors from kindergarten up until retirement
day. These can be teachers, role models,
supportive family members, older students, bosses, professionals, anyone.
Mentoring
can manifest itself in a whole variety of ways, some of which are organic and
not necessarily over the long term. Mentoring can be as small as telling your
cousin how cool it is she did well on her maths test each time you see her, or
helping a College student know what degree options are out there. At ANU, we’re working on the opposite kind of
mentoring. The kind that involves a long-term structured program with input
from a huge team of mentors.
Since
leaving New York, we have expanded our first year women in engineering and
computer science mentoring program which we are hoping to open up to all
genders next semester. We have set up programs for later year students to be
mentored by professionals from PwC and Cisco. We have more new programs in the
pipeline too, from ANU students mentoring Canberra primary school students, to
peer-to-peer mentoring between students in Cambodia and Australia. We’re
creating a network and we want as many people to get tangled up in our web as
possible!
I
encourage you to join our network, or start your own. Go find a mentor. Or,
better yet, find someone to be a mentor to.
Emily
[1]
Australian education network http://www.universityrankings.com.au/gender-balance-ratio.html
[3]
Brown University https://www.brown.edu/academics/engineering/undergraduate-study/admissions
CECS and the City
Emily Presents
CECS and the
City
Starring
Francesca Maclean, Bri Wade and me!
Three
girls, seven days and one city that never sleeps. This March, Francesca, Briana
and I were lucky enough to jet off to New York City for the Womensphere
Emerging Leaders Summit. This is the first of hopefully many years of CECS in
the City! As the team blogger, I guess I was the Carrie Bradshaw of the group.
Francesca was definitely Samantha Jones. She’s in her mid-twenties…that’s old,
right? And then Briana was a mix of Miranda Hobbes and Charlotte York. She has
Miranda’s ambition, Charlotte’s optimism, and both of their smarts. Together we
made a pretty killer team of women out to represent CECS.
Each
day of the conference covered a different theme in a different part of the
city. We talked about the fourth industrial revolution, the UN’s Sustainable
Development Goals and social entrepreneurialism We heard from people from all
walks of life, doctors, senators, lords, teachers, and global leaders. My
“episodes” don’t do it justice, but they will hopefully provide you with a
glimpse into the world we got to be a part of for three days.
Episode
3: Acronyms and lists
Episode
4: Entrepreneurship
There
are more episodes coming all the time. After all, I’ve got 6 seasons of Sex and
the City to catch up to!
Happy
reading.
Emily
