I recently spoke at an entrepreneurship conference in Windsor, Ontario.  The Canadian Council for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (CCSBE), built primarily on academic membership, is now encouraging attendance and input by non-academics, specifically business owners, policy makers, and practitioners who work to support entrepreneurs. The resulting mix at this year’s conference provided a rich offering of workshops and presentations that had some good application possibilities.

As an entrepreneurship development organization, it’s clear what benefits this kind of gathering might have for the Women’s Enterprise Centre of Manitoba, but for our entrepreneurial clients, what’s the payback for attending something like the CCSBE event?

When I had my own business, I would often pick up a copy of one of the North American academic journals that can be found in any business school library.  Whether its area of concentration was on management, marketing, entrepreneurship or organizational behavior, I always found something of interest that sparked an idea that I could use in my own business development.  Granted, some of this stuff is really abstract and statistical, but it’s ok to skip over the more esoteric methodologies to get to the conclusion, the meat of the study, to see what the findings tell you.  Similarly, reading the abstracts of articles, just getting the gist of what the research has been about, can inspire a wealth of creative thinking. 

Some brilliant people have spent countless hours studying entrepreneurs and their behavior.  Having that kind of aggregate information can’t help but serve the forward thinking entrepreneur in his/her imperatives to reach target markets, act strategically, utilize financial tools, measure activity against benchmarks, and get a good sense of what the rest of the enterprise world is doing to reach success.

In similar fashion, attending a conference can benefit the entrepreneur in many ways.  Listening, learning, informing and networking are all ways to refresh the brain and get a new handle on how things might be done better to enhance the bottom line. 

Meanwhile, check out International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal if this idea resonates with you.

 

 

 

 

Posted by Sandra Altner at 4:54 PM 0 Comments

Tags women entrepreneurs  women-owned businesses  Women’s Enterprise Centre  Canadian Council for Small Business and Entrepreneurship  International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal