Corporate Entrepreneurship, Teams: Types, Roles and Performance and Getting the Right Things Done.

Vaibmu organized a workshop at ICMA‘s Business Operations Forum in Vienna, Austria (Nov 6, 2010). There were three teams of 5-7 people. The team members were from different companies and countries. Naturally, none of them had been working together before. These diverse teams were given a challenging task that they were expected to execute successfully:

Develop, launch and market a real working classified advertising online site within five hours and, when finished, make a 10 minute investor pitch to sell your booming business!

To earn full points at the end of the day, the teams had to have a valid and working revenue model, at least 100 unique items in the database, and 100 unique visitors. Quite a challenge!

The Results

All the teams were able to launch and market their site within the time limitation. All of them were able to attract visitors with multiple methods and one of the teams successfully completed all the given milestones with their Just Dogs site.

Click the thumbnails below to see the two top sites of the day. They are true online classified advertising sites.

See more photos of the Vienna workshop here.

The Takeaways

In this workshop, we had five underlying themes that we emphasized throughout the day. However, to put the focus on the important issues, we provided pre-reading material before the day, rather than simply start working together. On the day of the workshop, this meant that the amount of academic discussion was almost zero and we succeeded in spending the whole day learning by doing.

The key takeaways were:

• Understand the mindset of start-up entrepreneurs – yes, they are the same guys who are planning to enter your markets!
• Success factors of an efficient team
• Roles in a team
• How to get the right things done
• Cross-cultural and cross-organizational team building

Organize This Workshop in Your Company

If you find the above mentioned takeaways useful for your organization, please download the brochure and  contact Vaibmu to have the workshop tailor made for your needs. It takes approximately 6 to 8 hours and the preferable amount of participants is 12-25 from your and your partners’ organizations.

DigitalTonto has made a blog entry about 4 Unlikely Digital Heroes which is an interesting read (and I am not saying this just because our company is featured in it!). The post reviews 4 companies that are quietly making huge steps in digital, also giving credit to the 2010 ICMA Classified Media Innovation Award which Vaibmu Ltd. has created for the International Classified Media Association and which pays tribute to companies in the classified media space who are innovating. As we noted in a previous entry and in our report with all the finalists ideas and projects, a lot of great product and strategy development is coming from traditional print publishers in digital media worldwide.

If you have a few minutes, be sure to read his insight about Time Warner, Condé Nast and Naspers as well as the Polish analytics company Gemius.