Last Tuesday I attended the BizSpark Innovation Accelerator in Dublin, an event organised by Microsoft Ireland in collaboration with Digital Media Forum.

The Event brought together over 200 attendees from different backgrounds but most of them  having a common goal for the day: gathering information about starting up a business.

In my opinion the event was a success as it covered everything from Licensing Agreements to HR, from Founding to PR, from research to product management to increase profitability. I firmly believe that even though the information was presented at a high level there wasn’t one person present that didn’t learn something new on the day. I know I returned with pages of notes.

One of the best presentations I attended, even though it is pretty hard to differentiate as they were all really good, was ‘Are you too nice for your own good? The dangers of bad HR.’

Sheena Clohessy’s message to all the starting companies was: ‘keep the HR management in your own hands’. She explained that a wrong choice of an employee will cost you over 60% of his yearly wage.

The 3 rules of HR that Sheena underlined are:

• Rule1 – Selection:
  • getting into your company needs to be a challenge. When someone comes for an interview don’t be afraid to ask them the tough questions like: ‘what is your biggest failure?’ or ‘What is the best/worst team you worked in?’
  • have a job description
  • do a reference check BEFORE hiring the person
  • use the 6 month probation period
  • Ask yourself these 3 questions:
    • Can they do it? = Their Ability
    • Will they do it? = Their Motivation
    • Will they fit in? = Their Attitude
• Rule2 – Fair Procedures:
  • When you hire someone you have to tell them how they can get fired – give them the reasons for dismissal
  • Have a disciplinary procedure
  • Get everything in writing – document everything
  • Don’t be overly tolerant
  • Be consistent
• Rule3 – Decide to lead:
  • Motivate people – the two key words here are ‘Achievement’ and ‘Recognition’

Another interesting and useful talk was Anton Mannering’s presentation about ‘The Power of Networking’.

Here are some of the points he addressed and that I added to my ‘Keep in Mind’ list:

- Use peoples’ names - I really think this, depending of your culture, might be easy or hard to get used to. Coming to Ireland from Romania, I always thought it was an Irish thing but I found out that there is more to it. By using a person’s name in the conversation you give them recognition; you are acknowledging them; and you show them that they are important to you.

- Listen – the other day I heard a story about the wise old owl living in an oak. The more he saw, the less he spoke. The less he spoke, the more he heard.

- Ask Questions – by asking questions you show interest and you also learn a lot.

- Nobody is a nobody – give your time to everybody. I could associate this to ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’

- Empower the others – share your knowledge! A friend of mine used this in a presentation also. She said that you have to go through life with one hand up and one hand down. You will find people in life that will be willing to help you and pull you up, genuine people like Anton for example; but don’t forget about the people behind you also, and give them a hand when they will need it.

- And finally, Focus on making Connections and not Sales.

There were a lot of other informative and eye opening presentations at this event, like Siofra Flood’s presentation about ‘What to put in the small print – top tips for end user licensing’ or ‘PR on a shoestring’ by Pat Phelan. Unfortunately I can’t cover them all here but I have good news. They were all recorded and they will be soon made available on the BizSpark website. I hope you’ll enjoy them as much as I did.

Posted by: Cristina Luminea

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 at 10:48 am and is filed under Business Issues, Event, Funding, Software/IT. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.