Presented some slides on building teams to a room-full of very keen and enthusiastic audience at the TiE Institute session last week at London Business School on “Leading High Performance Teams“..
I tremendously enjoyed Adam’s slides and his exercises…Will share my own slides on this post later…
Shared some slides at the India Investment Opportunities Forum in London yesterday.
I also talked about some of my investments (Myntra, Innoviti and ElementsAkademia) in India.
It was a good interactive session. I felt the mood is turning upbeat (although less so here in London and in the US).
Some notes from the “Emerging Markets” seminar on opportunities and challenges for entrepreneurs (part of the IED Best Practice encounters series) at which I shared a panel with Prof. Gerry Geirge and Prof. Chris Toumazou:
I shared a couple of slides (see below) as a preface to my observations:
I was here…talking to a bunch of bright people and listening to some great ideas…
Could anything have been more exciting?!
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Last Thursday, I made a brief presentation at the InvestorNet ICT Round Table in Copenhagen on “Why Asia and Why now?”.
The audience was a mix of European VCs (primarily from Scandinavia) and the discussion centred on what is happening in Asia and how that affects Europe’s lead in innovation and competitive edge…You can see the slides here
The failing Incubator model…?
At the same event in the afternoon, I heard a very interesting talk by Sam K Steffensen of 5te - an incubator situated in the IT University in Copenhagen. Sam was refreshingly direct and deliberately provocative…He said that the traditional incubation model is not working and people (and policy-makers) have not woken up to the possibilities (and the reality) of an inter-connected world…
Sam went on to criticise the environment for innovation in Europe and said that if you are a start-up, it does not help to be in Europe…(I almost had a sense of deja-vu: “No longer catching up with Silicon Valley…“)
Last Thursday (18th Jan), I shared a panel on “The New Argonauts: diasporas and talent flows“ with Li Gong, Cong Cao and AnnaLee Saxenian at the ”Atlas of Ideas” conference in London.
We briefly talked about the “global flows of talent, and the shift that is underway from ‘brain drain’ to ‘brain circulation’” around the world as skilled immigrants and professionals from Asia return home to start on their own or contribute indirectly to indigenous capability development.
This was followed by a lively Q&A session which spilled over an hour where we debated these views and the impact of these talent flows on innovation in the US and Europe.
Swati Piramal challenged the view that there was little propsect of fundamental innovation happening in India and I mentioned a few bottom-of-pyramid businesses that have the potential to threaten established business models in developed economies (see one of my earlier posts on this topic)
One of the attendees asked a very perceptive question about identities and allegiance of these “new argonauts“…Another asked whether these talent flows can be moderated and whether Governments should consider intervening to influence these flows…
All in all, lots of food for thought…
Here are the slides I shared with the audience before the Q&A.
