enkel ideas accelerator 2014: 10 weeks, 10 spaces, 15 entrepreneurs
Every Wednesday night during ten weeks from September to November, a group of us enkel members met at ten different spaces to help each other move our ideas forward. This first enkel ideas accelerator was a prototype for our coming learning programs for entrepreneurs and changemakers: An experiment in collaborative entrepreneurship.
One of the key aspects of the enkel collective is multi-disciplinarity, and we aim to have a diverse group of people at all our activities and events. We did well with this first accelerator. We were furniture makers, philosophers, architects, writers, engineers and futurists. A light designer. A teacher. Some seasoned and some budding entrepreneurs. All of us very different in many ways, but with many things in common too.
So what did we actually do during these ten nights? Well, we covered quite a lot of ground:
We tried classic start-up tools such as the business model canvas and the pitch deck.
We looked at the psychology of the entrepreneur and its relations to different personality theories, such as the outsider scale.
We experimented with skills, asset and resource mapping in our group and beyond.
We ate sushi and drank beer.
We talked about how to find our purpose and vision in an old bank vault.
We all did silent presentations with only images, symbols and quotes in the basement of a wine store.
We experimented with games and tools for stimulating creativity based on theories of five types of creative thinking.
We squeezed into Cat’s small city flat to do a business model speed dating exercise.
Some guests came along too: Dave from Woocom gave us excellent advice about what to do (and not to do) in our social media campaigns.
We discussed organisational models, ice coffee, social innovation, tackling wicked problems, whiskey, changing values and many, many other things.
We used this metaphor as structure for the workshop flow:
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Some reflections from the facilitator (Adam Jorlen):
Often when facilitating the workshops, I felt that we didn’t have enough time. The sessions were too short. We could have spent a whole day or weekend on some of the themes. We could have dived deeper into some of the things. We could have done more around networks and how to collaborate to make our ideas happen faster and better. More peer-to-peer learning. More futures and foresight methods and tools. More on business model generation. More on social media campaigns… More on everything. All good learnings for the next iteration…
And HUGE thanks to Brodie and the team at Spacecubed, to Dave from Woocom, to eTool Environmental Consultants for hosting us, and all the participants Ben, Fei, Chid, Megan, Jen, Rem, Damiano, Pete, Jordan, Andrew, Caitlin, Cat, John & Katie!
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Originally published at makersandchangemakersfremantle.wordpress.com on December 9, 2014.
