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.