Summary of Mar 15th - first conf call of BU EMI Alumni Committee
Mar 15th: Summary of first conf call items discussed - compiled by Beth Goldstein
Thank you to those of you who were able to participate in our first BU EMI Alumni Committee. A lot of great ideas were shared, as Iwill summarize below. Our next meeting is scheduled for Wed., April12 at noon EDT. Please call 617.358.1248 to participate in the call.
1) To encourage and expand participation in the BU Business Plan Competition we should add a "poster section" that allows all students/alumni to feature their business and be judged by a variety ofseasoned entrepreneurs. This will allow participants to receive morefeedback before they actually submit their applications for the competition.
2) We are considering developing an Online EMI Community where alum can share ideas about issues that are important to them. This can be inthe form of a blog or other online community. Sections can be created soonline forums/discussion groups are available. We might also offer Webinars on this sight to enhance the educational value.
3) We should consider offering a program like BU's very successful Symposium.http://smgpublish.bu.edu/symposium/index.shtml. This could be focused on issues important to alumni with a lot of interactive tracks/sessions allowing alum to speak with each other about topics of importance such as: Corporate entrepreneurship, running famiy businesses and industry/sector specifictopics. We'd like to use the email format initially to receive your thoughts and feedback about these topics and to provide you with the ability to share your ideas about ways we can expand the entrepreneurship community of BU alumni. In the future we might develop an online forum to continue our exchange.
posted by Sudha (Su) Jamthe @ 1:48 PM
1 Comments:
Hi Beth,
I enjoyed our first initial discussion last week.
About the EMI Online Community:
First, I think we should have discuss on this blog just so its archived and shared across new people joining the discussion.
Second, I am big on building an online community. By this I mean not just forums, but planned online events that tie the existing community of Alums attending conferences, and those who are in our databases with occasional contact (like I was till few months back) into a structured online community with events.
One idea is to offer a mentorship program and assign a volunteer mentor to enterprenuers.
We can explore this furher (like Tim said last week) by segmenting the Alumni community to new entreprenuers, seasoned entreprenuers, corporate entreprenuers, etc. and offer different motivations to keep them engaged.
For example, today Verisign bought a local MA based m-Qube for $250Mil in cash and one of the founders is Eswar Priyadarshan, who is a BU alum. Is it possible for us to maintain an online presence tracking our alumni's progress and engage them based on their motivation to give back to BU.
My experience in the online world has taught me that if we know our goals, the community will drive itself. So we can execute with one acitivity which makes most sense and take it from there.
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