Tuesday 22 June 2010, 19:00-21:00

We meet back at Dap & Co
Schokerweg 39
2583 BH Den Haag

The EPWN/Connecting Women Hague Borrel will take place on Tuesday 22 June 2010 from 19:00-21:00 at in Scheveningen Harbour, members and guests are always welcome!

Cost and registration
The cost of the Borrel is €12,50 per person. This will entitle you to two drinks and tapas. You are asked to pay this upon arrival to your hosts, Erika, Kitty or Anna. You will receive a token to redeem your drinks at the bar. Additional drinks are at your own cost.

Please make sure you register your attendance (either as a member or as a guest) via the EPWN website (click above).

Alternatively, you can send an email to Erika erika@bothassistanceandsupport.nl.

Please don’t forget to de-register if you are not able to make this event! We need to confirm the number of attendees with the restaurant 24 hours in advance.

Directions to the venue
There is plenty of free parking. If you are travelling by public transport, the nearest bus stop is called Statenlaan Noord and the closest tram from Den Haag Centraal Station is #17 (richting Statenkwartier). Get off at the (last) stop called Van Boetzelaerlaan.

We are looking forward to see you all and to enjoy yet another very exciting networking evening!

The international negotiation process is an alternative to warfare. In cases of conflicts negotiation is more effective than violence although to go to war is often perceived easier than to start the viable process of peaceful conflict resolution.

In an interactive lecture Paul Meerts of the Clingendael Institute in The Hague will give us insight in the international negotiation process and will address questions like: Why is negotiation – nowadays – the only legitimate conflict resolution method in the European Union? How did interstate bargaining evolve over time? When is a situation ready for negotiation and when is a negotiation process ready for an outcome? How do you deal with issues like trust and power, character and culture, interests and emotions? How do effective negotiators behave, what kind of strategies and tactics are applied? And what is the role of the unconscious?

Intellectual Property is seen as “the oil of the 21^st century”. It is the biggest asset of all businesses: from global corporations like Coca Cola® to independent advisors whose value lies in their trademarks, copyrights, designs, patents, and knowledge.

As an entrepreneur: Are you protecting your knowledge and innovation? Is there a way to better exploit your intellectual property? How can intellectual property enhance your market value?

And if you are in the corporate arena: What happens to your intellectual creation? To what extent are you the owner of your own work? How can you protect yourself?

Have you ever thought of becoming more active in EPWN Amsterdam City Network? About seizing the opportunity to create business opportunities for yourself, about learning from others, sharing what you know and learning about areas that you haven’t quite mastered?

It’s fun and it’s feasible to be more active in the network. Also if you hold a full-time job and need to juggle family commitments. It’s all about sharing the workload. We all hold fulltime jobs, and still we make it happen. Because we think it’s important, because we have fun together and because we take inspiration from our peers’ “can do” mentality.

We’re looking for new board members, committee leaders and committee members. We need your help.

Our goal is to keep up our high level quality and frequency of Programming that our members have become accustomed to.

The Federation’s ambition to grow to 5,001 members by the end of 2011 (60% growth). The Amsterdam City Network is serious about following suit.

To meet these ambitions and growth targets, we would like to ensure we have enough volunteers in our Programming Team, we need workshop leaders, new people to assist the work on the Amsterdam and the Federation Web Platform, volunteers to contribute to our membership retention and recruiment strategy. Perhaps you attend many of the social events and wouldn’t mind contributing to the organization of our Borrels. We are also in the look-out for a new Treasurer. Tip, our current treasurer, has done an amazing job and would like to make sure a successor is in place at the end of her tenure.

In short, we need you too. Contribute to the challenge – join our team of enthusiastic volunteers.

Did I mention that it’s fun and feasible?

Contact any of your Amsterdam board members today to chip in! Together, we CAN staff it, I’m sure.

This is a report on a recent brainstorming session that took place on 28 April 2010 at the Openbare Bibliotheek Amsterdam. The Board would like to thank Mary Jane Roy for her generous contribution to making this event report possible.

Entrepreneurs Community Corner, a key initiative

One of the key initiatives for the EuropeanPWN (EPWN) Federation in 2010 is the Entrepreneurs  Community Corner (ECC), which is intended to grow into a great support community for our entrepreneurial members across City Networks, to facilitate their sharing, connecting and leveraging one another’s knowledge, contacts and talents as they build their business.

There are good ideas coming from all of our City Networks on resources, links, experts and tools to add to the ECC.

To support this ECC initiative, the EuropeanPWN-Amsterdam Board invited our entrepreneurial spirits to a brainstorming session on the 28th of April, that was generously facilitated by Ursula Brinkmann (see the information below).

The objective of the session was to gather and collate all ideas, needs, interests, concerns our self-employed EPWN members, and to communicate the outcome of the session to the Federation Board.

‘What support do the entrepreneurial women of our network need?’ was the question that was posed by facilitator Ursula Brinkmann, following an efficient and eye-opening session of introductions. The “silent brainstorm” session proved to be a very effective manner to get ideas on the table in a surprisingly short period of time. Within 10 minutes, an extensive list of areas that need focus had been proposed and the participants began the process of categorising, sorting and voting. We thank Ursula Brinkmann for leading this productive session.

These are the results of the session

Within EPWN we have a wealth of knowledge and professional experience that we know can be of benefit for all of our entrepreneurs. The following image highlights the key areas of interest that our participating entrepreneurs put forward that evening (the percentage reflects the number of votes from our participants – a high percentage therefore means that the topic is high on the list of their needs).

The participants further discussed ways to make these results possible. One of the ideas was to organize a series of workshops for and by our entrepreneurial spirits, as a means to connect and offer relevant training.

Thank you too!

Our thanks also go out to Petra Rona, a guest of the evening (who has since become a member), who captured all ideas in a power point presentation (the above image is one of the slides). The Amsterdam Board looks forward to sharing this PPT with the other City Networks when we discuss ways to engage and facilitate exchange among entrepreneurs across the networks.

You can contribute too. How?

If you are passionate about what you do and wish to profile yourself and share your expertise with your fellow entrepreneurial members in Amsterdam and throughout Europe, please contact any of the Amsterdam Board Members. Include in your email what you would like to contribute, whether in terms of workshop topics, mentoring skills, business connections and otherwise.

Background information on Ursula Brinkmann

Ursula Brinkmann is co-founder and director of Intercultural Business Improvement Ltd, a consultancy and training firm specialized in intercultural management development.

Ursula has been delivering courses and presentations for a number of public and private organizations. One of her recent assignments consisted of workshops on Managing Dutch-German cultural differences for the integration teams involved in a major cross-border acquisition. In 2007/2008 she was responsible for an integration program for a European corporation; the program combined training, individual assessment, coaching as well as networking events for 180 managers.

Together with Oscar van Weerdenburg, Ursula developed the Intercultural Readiness Check (IRC), a questionnaire assessing four key intercultural competences. The IRC has been widely recognized in the academic and business communities, and its database by now is one of the largest sources of information on intercultural competences world-wide.