The JP Allen Blog

After spending July in Krakow, Poland visiting companies, startups, and universities, I am truly impressed with the Krakow tech scene.

Together with a colleague at Cisco Systems Poland, Ramon Tancinco, I have put together a small deck of slides introducing Krakow as a hub for taking advantage of the immense pool of technical talent in Central and Eastern Europe.  Krakow has it all:  low cost, a nice place to live or visit, an emerging culture of entrepreneurship and risk-taking, plus the political and legal stability of an EU country.  Learn why Google, IBM, CapGemini and many others have chosen Krakow as a high-tech location.

We created these slides in the context of the new San Francisco/Krakow sister city relationship.  The slides are licensed as open content, so help yourself.

[Slides in ppt format]  New version as of 27 January 2010.

Corporate entrepreneurship is the idea that large corporations can overcome their “risk-averse cultures” that “stifle innovation” and learn how to “create, develop, and sustain innovative new businesses”.

I’ve prepared a new executive lecture session on the opportunities offered by new information technology for promoting corporate entrepreneurship, broken down into three categories:

• Collaboration through ’social computing’ – enabling people to find each other and not have to ‘reinvent the wheel’, let voices and ideas be heard, and allow people to describe and categorize knowledge in the way they find most useful.
• Analytics and business intelligence – finding ways to take advantage of the masses of data being collected by firms.
• ‘Mass collaboration’ with the outside world – linking to innovation capabilities outside of any one business.

But can mere technology make a difference? Conventional wisdom says that corporate culture and leadership ultimately determine whether businesses can become more innovative and entrepreneurial, and that technologies are just tools. I wonder. Maybe the technology itself, if it connects enough people together, can be the source of significant change. Let’s see what our visiting executives have to say.

The slides are available here. This session will be part of the USF Corporate Entrepreneurship Latin America program for the ADEN Business School of Argentina, rated as the top MBA program in Latin America by Latin Trade magazine. Thanks to my colleague Carlos Baradello for organizing the session.