What can we do/are doing to encourage pro enterprise attitudes in our city

I've plenty of thoughts and will kick things off here

Building the pro enterprise eco-system in Krakow is a long term goal of tremendous importance and it would be good to think through all the issues so that the sum of the parts is greater than us all working independently.

There is a great opportunity as a result the critical mass that has now been achieved.

Hive - has really taken off..Their event Friday 4th November was brilliant upward of 300 people all into Start Ups
its backed by Applicake, Brightberries, and had the editor of Techcrunch Europe as a keynote and star guest

There is going to be a start up week end in January 2012 (at least that's what I keep on hearing) with the same backers.

www.Krakspot.pl - connected to Mediaframe -the AGH student circle has regular turnouts of several hundred where presentations from VCs and recent start ups figure regularly

This week I was at the opening of two more business incubators from AIP in the Uni of Agriculture and WSE.

Piotr Wilam and Marek Kapturkiewicz and his colleagues have founded Innovation Nestz with a school of entrepreneurship connected to it. It looks like it could turn into a full fledged www.techstars.com like accelerator

The Krakow Technology Park continues to build new incubators

Interactive Days - for those into marketing and on line issues attract 100s of people

Last but not least it is worth noting the active role of the local government in publicizing and encouraging participation in Global Entrepreneurship Week
All to often government and EU funded actions cost to much and achieve too little but in this case they deserve serious praise and recognition for what they have done..

I see most dynamism is in Hive Krakspot Innovation nest., TEDx type activities where people are involved because they want to be rather than because they are paid to be.

As those who attended TEDxKrakow Ramon Tancinco of Cisco was praising both Hive and Krakspot in his TEDx talk about Krakow Silicon Valley. Ramon is behind this English language intro to Krakow for the world

Bringing together the key components of the ecosystem and make sure we are all "on the same page" of open networks, collaboration, sharing etc is important.

For a long time I've had the vision of Enterprise Tuesday type intensity, where for the first few weeks of term there is an event. They make all the presentations available on their site here
Mamstartup in Warsaw with my encouragement has launched a creative commons section
for enterprise support materials on their web site

They wrote this nice review of Hive here

It looks like the KPT elevator pitch competition Moje 2 Minuty written about here will go national with Gazeta Wyborcza.

I'd like to draw attention to the "entrepreneurs from our school" pilot project (and the fantastic support I've been getting from Agnieszka Wlodarczyk who works for the Wojewoda, Paulina Lesniak - a student from the super active Krakow SFBCC http://sfbcc.org.pl/ and Jakub Malinowski who is still at school and did the web site.

One of the points of this project was to get schools and business people talking to each other. We need more Polish business people involved in supporting enterprise in their schools. Many people have said "yes it s a great idea but
with notable exceptions.. :-) not that many have actually approached their schools and offered help"

We are also lacking the active involvement of business schools at the moment, banks and financial institutions, a diary where we can all see all the events that are organised in my view

It would be great to hear what anyone else thinks

Richard Lucas
www.richardlucas.com
Global Entrepreneurship Week