The first Open University Business Network Breakfast Briefing of 2013 gets the New Year off to an excellent start with OU Vice Chancellor Martin Bean in conversation with Dr Fiona Ellis-Chadwick, Senior Lecturer in Retail Management and Academic Lead for the OU Business Network. The OU’s mission to industry will be centre stage as we are joined by business decision makers from the region for coffee, croissants and conversation.
But the wider picture is that universities and business still struggle to understand one another. Research reported a few months ago on the Guardian website reveals that industry and academe are keen on the benefits of working together, but have difficulty speaking each other’s language. Both sides are wary of disagreements, diverging priorities and different timescales. Employers have problems which universities could solve, but many suspect academics of being out of touch with business reality. Academics, on the other hand, are committed to rigorous research with lasting impact. It doesn’t happen overnight. Many potentially great collaborations go unexplored simply because neither side knows quite who to talk to in order to get things moving.
The Guardian report comes up with a number of suggestions on how to get people talking, from the equivalent of speed-dating sessions to something called a sandpit, in which participants can ‘play’ together in a non-threatening environment. There’s obviously a lot of scope for innovation in how to broker relationships.
It’s not apparent if anyone mentioned breakfast in the report, but over the last year or two it’s proved a great forum for sharing practical insights from OU research, and building links with business locally nationally and — via the web — internationally through the Business Network. Meanwhile the recently launched OU Business Perspectives programme is gathering pace as a way of fostering dialogue between researchers and managers. The OU is open for lots of things, including business. What else should we be doing to promote the meeting of minds?
We live in an age of unprecedently elaborate projects, indeed most of us make our living by being part of one or more of them – locatable somewhere on a flow chart between key milestones, aiming to squeeze out the next deliverable on time, within budget and fit for purpose. So Professor Liz Daniel’s November 29th Breakfast Briefing on getting more benefits from your projects promises to be a particularly worthwhile way of starting the working day. Projects of all sorts demand so much time, effort and money that we owe it to ourselves to make sure we are getting the most out of them.
Many of the most challenging projects are played out in the full glare of public scrutiny. One slip and the media will be baying for blood on behalf of outraged taxpayers or shareholders. Today’s project manager has therefore got to add public relations and customer care to the traditional project management skill set. The recent success of London 2012, surely one of the most difficult and visible large-scale projects ever undertaken, was due not only to a great technical performance, but also an outstanding effort to win hearts and minds. Not everyone’s projects will be on such an Olympian scale, but Professor Daniel’s insights promise to increase the amount of gold to be won from all of them.
On September 5th 2012 NOKIA unveiled the Lumia 920, according to its makers ‘the most innovative smartphone in the world’. The result of this launch? An immediate 18% drop in share price.
Admittedly, the launch event itself was bedevilled by embarrassing technical hitches and shares at the one-time mobile phone giant recovered again swiftly enough, but the sudden plunge goes to show how risky innovation can be as jumpy investors scramble to get a piece of the Next Big Thing.
Even if you are not in smartphones, though, innovation is an essential part of driving any business forward. New markets, new ideas, new ways of doing things — all involve risk, but the alternative is stagnation and decline.
No wonder, then, that business schools and their clients spend so much time and effort on how to manage innovation effectively. An important finding is that key aspects of successful innovation tend to be human rather than technological, in spite of our automatic equation of innovation with things like smartphones. Another is that innovation is everyone’s business. On 13th September three experts from the Open University, Professor James Fleck, Professor Steve Potter and Dr Clive Savory share their cutting edge research and insights on innovation in business, transport and healthcare with an audience of local decision-makers over breakfast. The event, run in association with Thames Valley HIEC, is now fully subscribed, but we’ll be sharing highlights on the web in due course.
Missed the 5 July Breakfast Briefing? Or just want a reminder of what Mark Fenton-O’Creevy had to say? Either way, check out the web page http://www8.open.ac.uk/business-school/corporate/business-network/money-and-emotions where you can see video highlights and follow links to other material.
There are still some places left at the next Breakfast Briefing at the Open University’s Milton Keynes campus on Thursday 5 July 2012 starting at 08.30 (breakfast served from 08.00. The topic is Money and Emotions – Professor Mark Fenton O’Creevy will give insights from his research on how emotions affect financial decision making. So a hot topic for our times. (The breakfast will be hot too.)
To book your free place email OU-Business-Network@open.ac.uk.
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day for healthy businesses as it is for healthy bodies. What better opportunity is there in any schedule to make connections and take on board new ideas than when you are at your most alert?
But what kind of breakfast is best for businesspeople keen to hone their intellects and energy for optimum performance? American experts Dr Frank Lawlis and Dr Maggie Greenwood-Robinson claim that ‘people who make a habit of eating breakfast can do more work, are able to mainitain their mental efficiency, have faster reaction times, think better, and stay in a more positive frame of mind’ in their 2008 Brain Power Cookbook, giving the following ‘brain foods’ a special mention:
- eggs (a great source of protein, which your brain needs to operate, as well as a subtance called tyrosine which increases alertness and speeds brain function)
- carbohydrates (especially the complex ones found in oats and wholegrain cereal, to sustain your energy levels)
- fruit (whose natural sugars provide an unbeatable source of slow-release energy to keep you going longer than the competition)
- water (hydration is essential for sustained brain function)
Not to mention that wonderful substance coffee. It’s a prime source of one of nature’s most useful (and ubiquitous) stimluants — caffeine. We don’t entirely understand how caffeine works, but there is mounting evidence that it improves one’s ability to understand and retain information. Our brains are full of busy neurons, firing away to convey ideas, sensations, impressions and so forth. As they do so they produce a substance called adenosine. This is picked up by the body’s monitoring system and when it reaches a certain level, the system produces messages to let us know we’re due for a rest. One of the great things about caffeine is that it blocks adenosine receptors temporarily, thus preventing fatigue — or at least delaying it for a while. As a result we have longer to perform at our peak.
The Open University Business Network menu performs pretty well against these criteria. There’s lashings of scalding coffee and tea (that other fountain of caffeine). Or, if you are perky enough already, a selection of decaffienated beverages. We go for the convenience of croissants and danish pastries over more obvious sources of protein, but it’s still in there amongst the energy-boosting carbohydrate. And there’s plenty of fruit juice plus bite-size slices of kiwi, melon and orange (the latter is particularly highly-rated for its brain-stimulating properties). But most of all, there is nutritious networking on offer as well as energising business thinking from expert presenters.
So — quite apart from the company you’re in — what kind of breakfast gets you going in the morning?
Perhaps it’s because I was switched on to the topic at Dr Fiona Ellis-Chadwick’s recent breakfast briefing on digital marketing, but suddenly ebusiness is big in my in-box.
My monthly update from www.trendwatching.com for May 2012 has an etail focus, predicting, amongst other things that European e-commerce sales are due to grow 78% by 2016. One of the world’s leading trend firms, trendwatching.com sends out its free, monthly Trend Briefings to more than 160,000 subscribers worldwide. (They ask you to say that if you quote them, but they are well worth a look).
Almost the next day, more digital details arrived in the shape of an update from the McKinsey Quarterly covering the rise of social media in China not to mention a subsequent newsletter packed with useful advice on using social media for your company.
Proof, were it needed, that joining the early birds at the Open University Business School’s Breakfast Briefings is the perfect way to keep abreast of trending topics in business today.
Dr Fiona Ellis-Chadwick’s upcoming OUBS Breakfast Briefing ‘Managing in Digital Markets’ on 25th April follows hot on the heels of a Guardian newspaper report that the average large UK website leaves no fewer than 14 tracking files (known as ‘cookies’) on your computer each time you visit it. See the full story here.
Cookies are small text files which websites leave on your computer so that they know who you are for next time you visit. This means, for example, that a website like Amazon can remember what you’ve bought in the past, and make recommendations on your next visit — just like your local bookseller might do in the real world if you’re a regular customer.
- Yummy — but are they good for you?
But are cookies really so innocuous?
These days they are not only used by the websites you visit, but shared with other businesses that you might know nothing about. According to the wonderfully-named Chris Babel who heads privacy consultancy TRUSTe (now there’s an 21st century business idea), a third of websites share their tracking information with third parties on a commercial basis. It’s a bit like that local bookseller slyly phoning the garden centre to tip them off that you’ve been browsing the vegetarian cookery books, and then emailing the garage to let them know you’ve bought a car maintenance manual, etc. etc.
Website owners say it makes browsing a better experience, as you get more of the information you want as the system ‘learns’ your tastes and interests. Perhaps they have a point. Furthermore, they display privacy policies that set it all out for you to read — at an average length of over two thousand words (yawn!). Finally, you can always set your browser not to store cookies — at the cost of a lot of valuable functionality.
You could argue that cookies are an innocent way for digital marketers to personalise their offers to to individual customers. Or you could argue that they are an insidious invasion of basic privacy.
What do you think?
The next briefing, on Wednesday 25 April 2012, is on ‘How to Manage in Digital Markets’. Fiona Ellis-Chadwick will be giving the presentation. She says:
‘Digital Marketing is changing the way we communicate. During the two last decades the internet has changed from an environment only for hard-wired computer specialists into an accessible global trading and social arena for consumers of all ages. This talk will de-bunk early predictions made about how the internet might re-shape business practices, explore online trading in the current economic climate and focus on practical considerations for managing in the digital future.’
To book your place, email ou-business-network@open.ac.uk
What a great session it was yesterday. Some very thought-provoking stuff from Brian (Professor Brian D Smith, http://www8.open.ac.uk/business-school/people/professor-brian-smith) on whether we are following the right route when we set SMART targets and encourage a strong team spirit in our workforce. Are we setting off down the road to progress or being led up the garden path?!
Soon we’ll have a video of the event on our Business Network website at http://www8.open.ac.uk/business-school/corporate/business-network/breakfast-briefings and if you missed the event, you can catch up with Brian’s presentation and share your experiences of strategy implementation.
