If you think Singularity University‘s activities don’t go beyond Silicon Valley and NASA Ames, think again. The American university is partnering for the second time with the Brazilian educational institution FIAP to organize an Executive Program in Sao Paulo.

This isn’t the first time FIAP has opened its doors to events and encouraged innovation; besides its partnership with Singularity University (SU), it has recently promoted a TEDx, TEDxFIAP, which focused on “Entrepreneurs of the Future.”

As for SU, there’s no doubt that is a magnet for brilliant minds interested in thinking our future – no matter whether or not you believe the singularity is near.

Besides its high-calibre line-up, the transdisciplinarity of its approach is one of the key factors of its success, and its Executive Program in Brazil won’t be any different.

Scheduled to take place on March 16th and 17th, the intensive course will welcome multihyphenate speakers such as the university’s global ambassador Salim Ismail, its Biotechnology and Bioinformatics co-chair Andrew Hessel, the professor and academic Vivek Wadhwa, the cyber crime specialist Marc Goodman, the former NASA astronaut Dan Barry and the stem cell expert Daniel Kraft.

The program’s tagline, ‘Are you ready for the future?’ gives a good idea of its agenda. From security to healthcare and robotics, keynotes will give the small audience some serious food for thought. Yet, participants won’t remain passive listeners, and are encouraged to engage with the content and exchange with the speakers.

As a matter of fact, FIAP’s team expects the course’s 200 participants to be fairly qualified. The program is targeted at CEOs, CIOs, entrepreneurs, government executives and other decision makers, FIAP says. Hence its hefty fee, up to US$3,200 for two days, which the IT university prefers to call an ‘investment’ – after all, understanding the future has no price.

A Call to Innovation

Yet, the impact of FIAP’s partnership with SU will go beyond the course’s lucky attendees. Indeed, both universities are partnering to launch a nationwide contest called Call to Innovation. To participate, Brazilians will have to submit tech-based ideas that could positively impact 1 million of their fellow citizens.

It’s worth mentioning that Brazil isn’t the only country where SU launched this contest; besides Mexico, Israel and Holland, the program will launch in ten additional countries by the end of March.

In each country, a winner will be picked, and receive a full scholarship to attend Singularity University’s ten-week Graduate Studies Program in California.

In Brazil, the winner will be announced in mid-April. Besides the SU scholarship and a round-trip ticket to the US, they will also receive a full scholarship for one of FIAP’s MBA programs. Says FIAP’s Innovation Director Nathalie Trutmann:

“Our ambition is to foster social entrepreneurship and help Brazil, so that the knowledge acquired during Singularity University’s course can be used to put in practice the tech innovation proposal that can transform and add value to the life of one million Brazilians over the next years.”

Have you already attended Singularity University or participated in one of the events it promotes? Let us know in the comments.

Article source: http://thenextweb.com/la/2012/02/10/singularity-university-disembarks-in-brazil-with-executive-program-and-call-to-innovation/

WELLESLEY, Mass., Feb. 10, 2012 /NEWS.GNOM.ES/ — Babson Entrepreneurship Professor Patricia G. Greene has received the John E. Hughes Award for Entrepreneurial Advocacy from the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE).

Greene holds the Paul T. Babson Chair in Entrepreneurial Studies at Babson. She previously served as Provost, and before that as the Dean of the Undergraduate School.

At Babson, Greene’s current assignment is to serve as the National Academic Director for the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses
initiative and advisor to the 10,000 Women program.

Named after its first recipient, John E. Hughes, the award is presented to an individual or organization that has consistently contributed
encouragement; support; physical, intellectual, and/or spiritual resources; time; talent and/or skills; development; and/or financial
contribution to further the cause of entrepreneurship.

Greene’s research focuses on the identification, acquisition, and combination of entrepreneurial resources, particularly by women and
minority entrepreneurs.

She is a founding member of the Diana Project, a research group focusing on women and the venture capital industry. The Diana Projects books include International Women’s Entrepreneurship: Research on the Growth of Women Owned Businesses, Women and Entrepreneurship: Contemporary Classics, and Clearing the Hurdles: Women Building High Growth Businesses (republished in Chinese). She is also a co-editor (with Mark Rice) of the book, Entrepreneurship Education. Her most recent book, (with Mark Rice, Michael Fetters, John Butler) is The Development of University-Based Entrepreneurship Ecosystems: Global Practices. Her work has been published in journals including Journal of Business Venturing, Venture Capital, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Journal of Business Research, Small Business Economics, Academy of Management Executive, Journal of Small Business Management and The National Journal of Sociology.

Prior to joining Babson Greene held the Ewing Marion Kauffman/Missouri Chair in Entrepreneurial Leadership at the University of Missouri – Kansas City (1998-2003) and the New Jersey Chair of Small Business and Entrepreneurship at Rutgers University (1996-1998).

She was a founding member of the Rutgers Center for Entrepreneurial Management and the coordinator of the Rutgers Entrepreneurship
Curriculum. At UMKC she helped to found KC SourceLink, the Entrepreneurial Growth Resource Center (EGRC), the iStrategy Studio, the Business and Information Development Group (BRIDG), the UMKC Students in Free Enterprise Program (SIFE), the Kauffman Entrepreneurship Internship Program (KEIP), the Entrepreneurial Effect, the Network for Entrepreneurship Educators and Researchers (NEER), and the annual regional Business Plan Competition.

Greene is Board Chair for the Center for Women’s Business Research, and serves on the advisory boards of Enterprising Women, the National Association of Women Business Owners, and Key Bank’s Key4Women. She is an appointed member of the national advisory board for the Small Business Administration’s Small Business Development Center program. She is a fellow of the IC2 Institute at the University of Texas at Austin and the Special Academic Advisor for the Guardian Life Small Business Research Institute. Her past service work includes serving as co-chair of the Steering Committee for the Entrepreneurship Affinity Group of the AACSB, and sitting on the boards of the State of Missouri Small Business Development Centers, Kansas Women’s Business Center, Growth Opportunity Connection, the Kansas City ATHENAPowerLink™ and the Helzberg Entrepreneurial Mentoring Program. Greene is a frequent speaker at national and international events. Prior to becoming a professor she worked primarily in the health care industry.

Greene earned a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, an MBA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a BS from the Pennsylvania State University.

USASBE
The United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE) is the largest independent, professional, academic organization in the world dedicated to advancing the discipline of entrepreneurship. With over 1000 members from universities and colleges, for-profit businesses, nonprofit organizations, and the public sector, USASBE is a diverse mix of professionals that share a common commitment to fostering entrepreneurial attitudes and behaviors.

Babson College
Babson College is the educator, convener, and thought leader for Entrepreneurship of All Kinds®. The College is a dynamic living and
learning laboratory, where students, faculty, and staff work together to address the real-world problems of business and society — while at the same time evolving our methods and advancing our programs. We shape the leaders our world needs most: those with strong functional knowledge and the skills and vision to navigate change, accommodate ambiguity, surmount complexity, and motivate teams in a common purpose to create economic and social value. As we have for nearly a half-century, Babson continues to advance Entrepreneurial Thought and Action(r) as the most positive force on the planet for generating sustainable economic and social value. For information, visit www.babson.edu.

This news release was issued on behalf of Newswise™. For more information, visit http://newswise.com.

SOURCE Babson College

http://www.babson.edu

Article source: http://news.gnom.es/pr/babson-professor-greene-receives-usasbe-entrepreneurial-advocacy-award

Three candidates for the dean of Montana State University’s College of Business will interview on campus Feb. 22-29. Each candidate will meet with faculty and students as well as give a public presentation with time for questions.

The finalists and the dates of the campus visits follow with the specific time and location of their public presentation. All public presentations will be in the Procrastinator Theater of MSU’s Strand Union Building and will be followed by a reception.

Feb. 22-23
Penne Ainsworth, Ph.D., CPA, CMA, CIA.
Associate Dean, College of Business
University of Wyoming
Public presentation, Thursday, Feb. 23, 9:30 – 11 a.m.

Penne Ainsworth has been at the University of Wyoming since 1997, coming there from Kansas State University where she taught accounting for 10 years. She became the chair of the UW Department of Accounting in 2004 and the associate dean, serving half-time, in 2005. She then became the associate dean, serving full-time, in 2010. Penne received her bachelor’s and master’s of accountancy from K-State and her doctorate from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

She received the senior teaching award in the College of Business at the University of Wyoming in 1999, 2001, and 2004 and the John P. Ellbogen Meritorious Classroom Teaching Award for UW in 2002.

Penne co-authored the original application for the grant K-State received from the Accounting Education Change Commission (AECC) and has authored five additional grants for accounting education and assessment at UW. She is the co-author of a textbook on accounting as well as other scholarly works in accounting. She is a member of the American Accounting Association (AAA), the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA), the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA), and the Wyoming Society of Certified Public Accountants.

Feb. 27-28
Kregg Aytes, Ph.D.
Interim Dean, College of Business
Idaho State University
Public presentation, Tuesday, Feb. 28, 9:30 – 11 a.m.

Kregg Aytes has been a member of the College of Business faculty at Idaho State University since 1993. He completed his doctorate in management information systems at the University of Arizona Eller College of Management that same year. Prior to his doctoral education, he worked as a systems engineer at IBM in Phoenix for five years after receiving his bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona.

During his time at ISU, Aytes has served as chair of the Computer Information Systems Department, associate dean, and is currently serving as the interim dean of the college.

He has taught a wide variety of courses, including subjects ranging from programming to strategy and small business consulting. He was named one of five master teachers at ISU in 2006.

He has also twice received the outstanding service award for the College of Business at ISU. Aytes’ research interests revolve around the management of IT, the use of technology to support group work, and more recently, the use of social media by entrepreneurs. He enjoys interacting with industry, through consulting and service on boards of various economic development organizations.

Feb. 28-29
Howard L. Smith, PhD
Boise State University
Public presentation, Wednesday, Feb. 29, 3 – 4 p.m.

Howard L. Smith is professor in the Department of Management, former vice president, 2007-2011, for University Advancement and past dean, 2006-2007, of the College of Business and Economics at Boise State University.

He formerly served as dean at the Anderson Schools of Management and School of Public Administration, University of New Mexico, 1994-2004, director of the Program for Creative Enterprise and the Creative Enterprise Endowed Chair, 2004-2006. From 1990 to 1994, Smith also served as associate dean at the Anderson Schools at the UNM.

He has published more than 230 articles on health services, organization theory/behavior and strategic management topics in journals such as the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Decision Sciences, Health Services Research, Journal of the American Medical Association, and New England Journal of Medicine.

He has published seven books on prospective payment, staff development, hospital competition, health care financial management, strategic nursing management, reinventing medical practice, and higher education strategy. He has also published three books on nature literature: “In the Company of Wild Bears: A Celebration of Backcountry Grizzlies and Black Bears,” The Lyons Press, 2006; “Mountain Harmonies: Walking the Western Wildernesses,” UNM Press, 2004; and “The Last Best Adventure,” CreateSpace, 2011. He has consulted both nationally and internationally on various projects.

Curriculum vitae for all three candidates are available below.

“These three candidates were chose from a national pool of more than 50 applicants,” said MSU Provost Martha Potvin. “There is a great deal of excitement around our college of business these days and that was reflected in the quality of the candidates we had to select from.”

The dean search committee hopes to have completed the search by mid-March with a new dean starting by July 1.

The dean position came open last spring, when Dan Moshavi left the position to become dean of the School of Business and Leadership at Dominican University of California in San Rafael. Susan Dana, who did not apply for the permanent position, has been serving as interim dean.

With roughly 1,200 students, the MSU College of Business offers undergraduate programs in accounting, finance, management, and marketing as well as minors in accounting, business administration, entrepreneurship and small business management, international business, and the management of information technology. The college also offers a master’s of professional accountancy degree, designed to prepare student for professional careers in the field of accounting.

The college is home to the Alderson Program in Entrepreneurship, which has been twice recognized by Entrepreneur magazine, and the Gary K. Bracken Center for Excellence in Undergraduate Education, which was funded by a $3 million gift from the friends and family of college of business graduate Gary Bracken (’61). Scholarships, travel abroad fellowships and internships, career counseling services, mentoring programs, executives-in-residence, small classes and curriculum development are supported through The Bracken Center.

In 2010, MSU alumnus Jake Jabs gave the college $3 million to establish the Jake Jabs Center for Entrepreneurship for the New West. Jabs followed up with a $25 million gift in 2011 that will allow the college to construct a new building to house its programs. Ground is expected to be broken in 2013 with completion in 2015.

MSU College of Business graduating seniors have taken the Major Field Test-Business since the summer of 2005, and the mean has consistently been at the 90th percentile of the national norms reported by the Educational Testing Service, the world’s largest, private, nonprofit educational testing and assessment organization.

Article source: http://www.montana.edu/cpa/news/nwview.php?article=10827

February 10, 2012, 4:49 AM EST

By Oliver Staley

Feb. 10 (Bloomberg) — When Marion McCollom Hampton graduated from the Yale School of Management in 1982, the program didn’t grant business degrees and she didn’t want one. Its mission was to train leaders of all sorts, not just executives, she said.

Yale “was not your father’s business school,” said Hampton, 61, who works as an adviser to family-owned companies. “When the school was founded, it had an absolutely unique niche in the management-school world.”

Yale SOM opened in 1976 with a focus on grooming leaders in government and philanthropy. Now the school is preparing to take on Harvard Business School and the Wharton School with a new $222 million building and new dean — Edward “Ted” Snyder, who previously led the University of Chicago’s top-ranked business school. As Yale’s business school sheds its outsider status, alumni and former faculty worry that it risks losing its unique qualities just when the business world needs them most.

“I’m not sure that the changes that are being made now are going to produce the sort of graduate who is going to use that management and business knowledge to make a difference in the world,” said Hampton, who turned down the opportunity to convert her management degree to an MBA. “To make it just another business school, to me, is a shame.”

Public-Mindedness

Snyder, 58, who took the helm in July, was hired by Yale University President Richard Levin to help raise the business school to the levels of Yale’s top-ranked schools of law and medicine. Snyder, who led Chicago’s Booth School of Business for a decade and the University of Virginia’s business school before that, said Yale can improve without giving up the public- mindedness that sets it apart.

Yale SOM trains its graduates to understand the complicated relationships between business, government and society, Snyder said in an interview in his New Haven, Connecticut, office.

“The world is facing extraordinarily big issues,” Snyder said. “Leaders have to be aware of what’s going on. Obviously they need to be competent in solving business problems but they need to be in tune with this extraordinarily important layer of complexity.”

Snyder said his mission is to tell the world what Yale graduates can offer.

“We’ve got some great people here who can help the world solve some big problems,” he said.

Top Five

Snyder said he loves competition — he set a Colby College record in the triple jump in 1972 — and he’s determined to boost Yale SOM’s rankings. He wants it to be one of the top five U.S. business schools in a decade, he said.

Yale’s full-time MBA program is ranked 21st by Bloomberg Businessweek compared with first for Chicago, second for Harvard and third for Wharton. Yale graduates’ median base salary was $100,000 for the class of 2011, trailing the $120,000 earned by business school graduates at Harvard and Wharton.

While Yale has produced prominent executives like Indra Nooyi, chief executive officer of PepsiCo Inc. and a 1980 graduate, it’s escaped the notoriety of high-profile alumni winding up in prison, such as Harvard’s Jeffrey Skilling, former CEO of Enron Corp., and Wharton’s Raj Rajaratnam, a hedge fund manager convicted of insider trading.

Snyder won’t try to impose his ideology on Yale faculty, which would be “suicidal,” said Steven Kaplan, a finance and entrepreneurship professor at Chicago Booth. Instead, he’ll boost the school by identifying its strengths and selling them to potential students and donors, Kaplan said.

“SOM has a lot more potential than it has currently reached,” Kaplan said. Snyder “has to figure out how to position the school and he’ll market that externally.”

Nonprofit, Government Jobs

Yale didn’t offer a masters degree in business administration until 1999, and didn’t phase out its masters of public and private management until after 2001. While most graduates take jobs in private industry, 10 percent work for nonprofit organizations and government, compared with 3 percent of graduates at Harvard Business School and 1 percent at Wharton.

In the wake of the financial crisis, Harvard Business School appointed Nitin Nohria as dean in 2010. Nohria, who has written about ethics, says business students should take a professional oath of conduct. Harvard also introduced a leadership course designed to immerse students in real-world experiences. In 2010, Wharton, part of the University of Pennsylvania, said it would overhaul its curriculum with a new focus on ethics and on global issues.

Yale SOM was at the forefront of introducing those ideas to business education and should continue to be a leader, said William Donaldson, former chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the first dean of Yale SOM.

Advancing the Cause

“There’s a lot of criticisms of business school in general, as perpetuators of what’s going on that’s bad in business,” Donaldson said. “Yale has a position where it can really advance the cause, because it’s Yale and because of the history of the school.”

Snyder will be boosted by a new 242,000 square-foot building, designed by Norman Foster and set to open in 2013, which will allow the school to add more students and faculty. Snyder plans to expand international programs, which he said lag behind those of other business schools and the rest of the university.

He also wants Yale to bolster its reputation with corporate recruiters from top companies. Already, the school is placing more graduates at businesses such as Barclays Plc, Goldman Sachs and McKinsey Co. than in years past, Snyder said.

“The numbers aren’t huge — they’re going from zeros, ones, twos and threes to fours and fives and sixes — but it makes a huge difference for the school going forward,” Snyder said. “We’re never going to be a big core school for McKinsey but are we going to be an accepted source of high-quality talent? We don’t want that question to come up.”

Teamwork Culture

Barclays went from hiring two graduates from the class of 2010 to seven from the class of 2012, according to the company.

“The thing that really stands out is teamwork,” said Tara Udut, Barclays Capital’s head of campus recruiting for the Americas. “It’s part of the overall culture there.”

Alumni worry that to climb in the rankings, Yale SOM will reorient itself around the world of finance and Wall Street, said Chris LaFarge, who graduated in 1980.

“The rankings are distorting a business school’s ability to do something outside of the box,” said LaFarge, CEO of MedicaMetrix Inc., a medical-device company in Wayland, Massachusetts. “Yale should be able to get away with it because it’s Yale.”

‘Points of Pride’

While rankings don’t tell the whole story about business schools, they can attract more applicants and please graduates, said David Schmittlein, dean of the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Rankings can be points of pride with alumni and the feelings alumni hold for the school are important,” Schmittlein said.

Students and faculty will also look to Snyder to provide stability at an institution that has had little of it, going through 10 deans in its short history.

While the Wharton School was founded in 1881 and Harvard Business School in 1908, Yale University’s faculty and administration resisted for decades alumni efforts to start a school they saw as at odds with its humanistic values.

Under Kingman Brewster, Yale’s president from 1963 to 1977, that resistance began to crumble as the university put more emphasis on social sciences, including the study of economics and organizational behavior. The college received a bequest of $15 million from the estate of Frederick Beinecke, who died in 1971. Most of the money was directed to the founding of a new school for the study of management.

‘New and Different’

Brewster was adamant that Yale wouldn’t start a business school, said Victor Vroom, who was then chairman of the department of administrative sciences and a member of the committee charged with developing the new school.

“It’s got to be different,” Brewster told the committee, according to Vroom, 78, who still teaches at Yale. “We can’t copy Wharton, we can’t copy Harvard. It has to be new and different.”

The school, originally named the School of Organization and Management, was intended to educate managers for government, nonprofit companies and business and drew some of its curriculum from Yale departments that focused on human behavior, said Donaldson, the first dean. They even considered bringing in professors from the divinity school to teach ethics, he said.

In its early years, Yale SOM attracted students who might have otherwise considered studying law or government, Donaldson said.

Different ‘Cat’

“It was for a different sort of cat,” said Ned Lamont, a Connecticut entrepreneur and former U.S. Senate candidate who graduated in 1980. “I was on a different track and I loved the SOM message.”

Much of that spirit ended abruptly in October 1988, when Dean Michael Levine and Yale President Benno Schmidt decided to turn SOM into a traditional business school, eliminating faculty and departments they viewed as nonessential.

“They really gutted the school and made it more into a Chicago, Michigan place, more of a finance and accounting place,” LaFarge said.

Students and alumni were furious at the unilateral decisions, and hired a plane to tow a banner denouncing the moves over the university’s graduation. It took a decade for the school to regain its equilibrium.

Snyder, who earned his Ph.D. in economics from Chicago, served as the dean of the Darden School of Business at Virginia from 1998 to 2001 before returning to run Chicago. While at Chicago, he secured a record $300 million gift from David Booth, chairman of Dimensional Fund Advisors LP, an Austin, Texas-based hedge fund.

Milton Friedman

Snyder also helped found the Milton Friedman Institute, a research center named after the Nobel prize-winning economist noted for his free-market philosophy and revered by conservatives. It’s now called the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics.

Snyder’s background made him a surprising choice for Yale, said David Thomas, dean of Georgetown University’s business school who received his Ph.D. in organizational behavior from Yale in 1986. Graduates of Yale SOM wondered if a free-market advocate would be a good fit, he said.

“That’s the question that’s on some people’s minds,” Thomas said.

Snyder said that while he believes in laissez-faire principles, he recognizes the interconnectedness of business and governments.

“Governments are playing a bigger role and market economies are evolving very differently,” he said.

Donor Cultivator

Snyder’s success at Chicago resulted from his ability to manage relationships, said Robert Topel, a professor at Chicago Booth who is writing an economics paper with Snyder. Snyder can massage the egos of “prima donna” professors, defend the business school’s interests to the university president and cultivate donors, Topel said.

“He’s extraordinarily good at communicating what it is we do and defending what we do and marketing what we do and looking the donor straight in the eye and saying ‘Can I have some money?’” Topel said.

So far, Snyder has shown a willingness to bolster the school without forcing changes, said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a senior associate dean who studies CEO leadership.

“He’s been one of the best bosses I’ve ever had,” Sonnenfeld said. “He’s come in with no grandiosity. He has ambition institutionally for the school and absolutely no ego personally.”

Yale DNA

Tom Taft, a 1985 graduate, said the school will continue to produce socially conscious graduates no matter who is in charge.

A fifth-generation Yale graduate and the great-grandson of William Howard Taft, the 27th U.S. president, Taft said the spirit of the school survived the Levine era.

“Despite efforts to turn the school into Wharton, there’s an inherent DNA in SOM that makes it a real special place,” Taft said. “Regardless of the administration, it’s going to be a place where students come in and walk out with a picture that the world is a bigger place.”

–Editors: Lisa Wolfson, Jonathan Kaufman

To contact the reporter on this story: Oliver Staley in New York at ostaley@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Lisa Wolfson at lwolfson@bloomberg.net

Article source: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-02-10/chicago-man-rescuing-yale-business-rank-prompts-ethical-anxiety.html

The next time your parents order you to log off Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, and focus on studies instead, it may be a good idea not to listen to them. When it comes to preparing for new-age careers, Facebook may do a better job than your textbook.

Ask Jaideep Bir. This 28-year-old entrepreneur quit his job in a dotcom a few years ago to start his own social media marketing company that uses social networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook to market products and brands. Today, his clients range from large multinationals to education institutions for which he has designed fan pages on social media sites.

“We also work offline, distributing RFID (radio frequency identification) cards to people who attend events conducted by various brands. The RFID card automatically updates your location on Facebook, so that all your friends know you are attending the event. This helps publicize the brand,” says Jaideep.

He is just one among a growing number of Indians opting out of conventional careers and treading the path less taken. Like Himani Khurana, who stumbled upon a career in jazz, ballroom and contemporary dance while studying English at Lady Shri Ram College. While most professionals learn dance from the age of five, Himani began at 20, when she joined a class near her college. What started out as a hobby turned into a career. “I had the opportunity to work with dancers from overseas and even went abroad to pursue dance,” says Himani.

Serendipity has had a hand in several career choices. Take for instance artist O P Rathore, the voice behind a host of advertisements, both for the government as well as corporates. Rathore chanced upon the field 20 years ago when he lent his voice to a radio promo on the freedom struggle. “The promo did very well and people wanted to know whose voice it was. That’s how I started getting more contracts. I never thought I would end up making a career of it,” he says.

While selecting a career has, traditionally, been a weighty affair, youngsters are now experimenting with their lives till they zero in on a field that interests them. Simar Sukhija, who runs a nail bar in Delhi, specializes in decorating nails and offers everything from manicures to nail extensions.

Though video games and mobile phone applications may be the bane of the average middle-class parent, creating them is now a lucrative career option, often paying better than the good, old-fashioned careers.

While entrepreneurship doesn’t quite fit in with the traditional Indian dream of a stable career, some, like Rishabh Gupta, took the plunge. “Turning entrepreneur has been a childhood dream. I have always been in awe of folks like Richard Branson,” says Gupta, an economics graduate from Delhi University.

After an MBA from Manipal, Rishabh figured he had no experience of how to run his own business, and so he joined the corporate sector to gather work experience. “But after switching three jobs in two years, I figured this was not my calling. I decided it was time to turn entrepreneur,” says Gupta, who joined hands with a friend and began a company that links young people with corporates.

While the idea initially revolved around summer internships, it has now expanded to several areas involved with equipping students for the corporate sector. “We have roped in students as brand ambassadors on campus for various companies, and are using social media to spread the word. We also get young people to work part-time for corporates on areas such as presentation and cleaning up digital content. These jobs are are a perfect fit for youngsters seeking exposure to the job market,” adds Rishabh.

Article source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Social-networking-may-be-a-boon-for-new-age-choices/articleshow/11831829.cms

North East businesses are being invited to listen and be inspired by amazing stories from local Social Enterprises and to learn from their experience of start-up as well as being given an opportunity to hear advice from the Student Law Office at Northumbria University Law School on the legalities of setting up a social enterprise. 

Social enterprises are a growing, worldwide movement of businesses that look to tackle social problems, improve communities and enhance people’s lives. Doing It for our Community, hosted by the Student Law Office at Northumbria University Law School and North East business Fast Forward Now Ltd, are bringing together individuals and organisations that are actively making the North-East a better place.

The event, Doing It for our Community – Conversations in Social Enterprise, will take place on Thursday the 23rd of February 6pm-9pm at the Great Hall, Sutherland Building, Northumbria University.  Delegates will have the opportunity to hear from the Nationally acclaimed and multi-award winning Social Enterprise,Tyne Gateway Trust, who will be speaking about the work they do supporting communities and employers, helping them work together to address family and child poverty issues.

Cross-cultural, community music projectCrossings, a project that brings together asylum seekers, refugees, local and international musicians to collaborate on the development and performance of their music, which promotes integration and cohesion in communities.  There will be an opportunity to hear the Women’s Choir sing and then listen to them speak.

And Jam Jar Cinema CIC, winner of the Social Entrepreneurship category of the 2011 Blueprint Awards, an innovative and modern Social Enterprise with the aim of improving access to arts provision in the North East. Jam Jar is due to open their first venue in April 2012 with a further three venues scheduled over the next two years.

Angela McLean, Managing Director of Fast Forward Ltd, who is organising the event in collaboration with the Student Law Office said “We need to inspire more people to set up social enterprises and listening to the stories of others is motivational – we want to demystify the process of setting up a social enterprise and this is why we have joined with the Student Law Office at Northumbria Law School.”

Elaine Campbell, Solicitor Tutor in the Student Law Office added “our award winning pro bono legal clinic, the Student Law Office, is increasingly providing free legal advice to social enterprises and charity groups. We are delighted to join with Angela and her to team to help social enterprises share their experiences at this fantastic event”.

The three very different social enterprises will illustrate the work that they are doing and the fantastic results and impact they are having on north east communities.   Funding and understanding the legalities are just two of the topics that will be under discussion.

Come and be inspired by their determination and success so far and stay for our question and answer session with the speakers.  The evening is also an opportunity to network.

Thursday the 23rd of February 6pm-9pm at the Great Hall Sutherland Building Northumbria University.

Places are FOC but limited.  To book visit www.doingitforourcommunity.eventbrite.com, or contact Elaine Campbell at Northumbria University on 0191 227 7548 or Elaine.campbell@northumbria.ac.uk for more information.

Article source: http://bdaily.co.uk/news/business/10-02-2012/northumbria-law-school-hosts-social-enterprise-event/