business.creativity.life.

For the capital of a nation such as Canada, Ottawa brings ‘big city’ caliber with a small-town, homely feel. Amongst its eclectic mix of high-tech, politics and Government driven population, business and innovation are domains that have a large following but are often not recognized or even associated with Ottawa. So how do we bring these hidden gems to the forefront? The Ottawa Innovation Challenge is just one of the ways in which we can expose and highlight the emerging talent in business and innovation.

OIC is an event dear to my heart as I had the privilege to work with Steve Robins, Will Armstrong and Manu Sharma on this initiative from the day the idea was brought up in a casual TalentBridge Friday conversation. I’ve organized events before but working on the OIC was a unique learning experience in itself.  We had many discussions, debates and focus groups to make sure we were creating something of purpose and value to both students and companies.

Bringing an idea like this to fruition in just a matter of weeks clearly illustrates how much we believe in its purpose and what opportunities it can bring to the young entrepreneurial innovators of Ottawa. We are actively taking an initiative to establish a new name for Ottawa. One that connotates originality, creativity, forward-thinking, and opportunity. Please join us for the weekend-long event, that is sure to be filled with fun, learning and opportunity. If you are unable to attend but still want to be in on the action, feel free to follow the event via twitter (@innovateottawa) to have a live feed of the weekend’s happenings and please stay tuned for the next OIC!

What:      The Ottawa Innovation Challenge (OIC)

A 48-hour competition to find creative, entrepreneurial solutions for real business problems presented from Ottawa-based companies: Benbria and ThinkSM.

When:    Friday, August 21 @5pm to Sunday, August 23, 2009

Where:   Carleton University, Ottawa

Who:        Registered students from a recognized post secondary institution with an interest or background in entrepreneurship and business development are eligible to register. Applicants must be highly motivated, comfortable with working in a diverse team, as teams will be assembled by the OIC committee, and must have a keen interest in entrepreneurship

How:        Contact Steve Robins at steve@innovationottawa.com or Manu Sharma msharma@ocri.ca to register now! Find additional information at  www.innovationottawa.com

Why:

• Showcase your talents where it matters: in application to real-world problems 
• Become exposed to the realities of the business world, with the presented problems, developing teamwork strategies and working through a problem-solving pipeline
• Network with top Ottawa company executives and bright, young talent of Ottawa

This morning I had the privilege of attending Ottawa’s Social Media Breakfast, a monthly early morning event where Ottawa’s social media experts and beginners come together to eat, share and learn about the emerging trend of social media. At today’s event Toronto rogue entrepreneur, David Crow(@davidcrow), shared his thoughts on the growing craze giving not only insight on the topic but also how we can each tap into it and have it work for us. Encouraging quotes and thought provoking questions, both included below, were interspersed throughout his one-hour talk. 

“the future exists today. It’s just unevenly distributed” – William Gibson

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it” – Alan Kay

From the get-go I’ll admit that I was expecting to see an older gentleman standing before us, educating us on the wisdom he gained over the years, etc, etc. But instead Mr Crow was a fun, fresh, intriguing character who talked openly about current viral companies or ideas like: WillItBlend? and mentos + coke on David Letterman. He spoke candidly about his beginnings in kinesiology at Waterloo, and his reasoning for the degree being its higher female population, onto his days at Carnegie Mellon to now being at Microsoft and helping budding Canadian entrepreneurs in parallel. But sprinkled among his personal information was truly insightful information about how to capitalize on social media mainly through establishing meaningful experiences for users. At the root of all examples and inspirational stories, Mr Crow made it a point to repeat the point: stop accepting mediocre, build awesomeexperiences and always strive for greatness. After all the majority of social media outlets are available as the ‘digital glue’ for anyone and everyone to use as a means of converging advertising, marketing and customers. So how do you make your idea stick? Mediocrity is no longer an option; “don’t just sit back and [observe], take the leap, know you might fail but that you will learn [in the process]”.

The following are a few key points taken from this morning’s event:

• The essence of marketing (continuous cycle)
  • Attract > engage > excite
• Mankind extends by
  • Amplifying tools
    • Tools that help you ‘reach’   
  •  Goal cloning
    • Building tools that motivate people to do one thing (ex: how do you get the world to watch football on television?)
• Social media is one of the media facets, it is the digital glue
• The marketing landscape is no longer a ‘push’ method
•  There are millions of websites, it’s about the ‘data’
  • How do you track the site?
  • How do you manipulate it?
  • Need to track and understand what people are doing
• Markets are conversations
  • Need to engage
• Every business has 2 functions
  • Marketing
  • Innovation
  • **social media touches both sides of this equation
• social media tools don’t make conversations, they support it!
  • By understanding how social media supports human desire for conversations , businesses can open vibrant interactions with individuals and communities
• Generate memories and an experience, build an emotional connection
• Social media is:
  • The connection point
  • It is the glue
  • Is isn’t one channel, it’s all channels
  • It’s where your audience is
• 5 Principles of Social Capital (excerpt from Tara Hunt’s The Whuffie Factor)
  • stop talking, start listening
  • become part of the community you serve
  • create amazing user experiences
  • embrace the chaos
  • find your higher purpose

David Crow (@davidcrow)

•  www.linkedin.com/davidcrow
• www.davidcrow.ca
• His initiatives
  • DemoCamp
  • Founders & Funders
  • StartupEmpire

First, zone5 at lunch and then Malcolm Gladwell this evening. If attending that combination of events doesn’t inspire or motivate you to get off your butt and start doing something to improve yourself, I am not sure what will. 

Malcolm Gladwell, a revered writer for The New Yorker and famed author of multiple books, namely The Tipping Point, Outliers and Blink, spoke earlier today an interesting interview at the NAC here in Ottawa. He touched on a variety of topics, both those that were included in his books as well some food for thought. He took concepts of education, health care, genetics, culture, history, and philanthropy and melted them all into the most insightful and intelligently stimulating hour I have ever experienced. Whatever idea came to the interviewer’s mouth was said, and topics that Mr. Gladwell felt didn’t effectively contribute to his beliefs or thoughts were politely excused.

When it came to his main motivation: working hard to be successful, he was brutally honest and made it a point to inculcate that working excessively hard for something is reality. It was almost like a ‘Dr. Phil’ approach with a much less Texan vibe. To make us all truly understand how and why this is ‘the richest generation’ of time’s truth he explored personal examples and life stories to get us to truly understand what he was advocating.  The most striking thing to me was that Mr. Gladwell is such an eloquent speaker that any set of words he strings together could be a stand alone quote, yet when he was talking he wore the hat of ‘a regular guy’. He joked around and was working the crowd into repetitive laughter. I can’t stress enough how valuable of an occasion it was. To relay some of the important information I retained from the presentation I have included some quotes and topics of discussion from the evening below. Enjoy!

Highlighted Topics of Discussion

U.S.A is the most individualistic society in the world

• Unlike Canada, where there is a unique combination of
  • High collectivism
    • “[We] have an intrinsic motivation to include”
  • Low hierarchy
    • “[We are] not wedded to bureaucratic ways of doing things”
• In the U.S they are at least fifty years behind the times, and they’re looking for guidance from us Canadians

Why are Asian students [on average] better at math?

• There is no evidence of genetics playing a role
• Asian countries like Korea, Singapore, Japan, etc are all rice agriculture countries – the most labor intensive harvesting in human history
•  So it only makes sense that these people are hard workers, that is how they have been brought up
• But “we are not prisoners of our culture. We can learn from each other”

Creating winners

• Two things must be administered
• Motivate the person/people to do something they don’t want to do
• Be diligent in making them do it

Is [having] a balance in education equivalent to watered-down success?

• We are too quick to deem things as weaknesses
• A friend of Mr. Gladwell who has a 9-year-old daughter explained to Malcolm that he didn’t feel his daughter had a ‘math’ mindset.
• No nine-year old has developed an aptitude for math so in-depth that one can comfortably separate them from an entire population of math-inclined people.
• “There is zero usefulness in ranking people, [especially children], at a non-university level”
• Everyone CAN learn the topic at hand. They just learn it in different ways and at different rates.

[What are some] leadership roles that outliers should play in society?

• Bill Gates can be deemed the ‘luckiest’ man of the 20th century
• His philanthropy is proportional to his success
• He doesn’t feel he needs his wealth
• Yes, some can say he is ‘insanely lucky’ but the key is that he finds humility in his achievements

Quotes From the Evening

“Accept and embrace that success is a function of your own efforts and opportunities that have nothing to do with you”

“[Malcolm Gladwell and his messages] celebrate the extraordinary role that WE can play in our own success”

“[Mr. Gladwell’s teachings] inspire you to think about your achievements and inspirations”

“The most important thing about solving a problem is in how you frame or position it”

“How much we succeed [individually] is a group project that we, as a society, have the control over”

“Something can be staring you right in the face, but it can be very difficult to do”

“Excellence is not an accident with things you are born with”

“Nothing can be excelled [in] without an extraordinary amount of hard work”