This week I’ll be giving a presentation to students following a series on a new “Enterprising Canada”. It’s an idea that visiting professor at Ryerson, Gerrard Kennedy, came up and has been promoting as a new way of looking at entrepreneurship in Canada. In my perspective, the whole idea can be described as being an entrepreneur and creating new opportunities in Canada while at the same time adding to the social bottom line.
Don’t try to google for “Enterprising Canada”, nothing is out there yet.
The past presentations I’ve attended in the series covered CSR and environmental sustainability. For my presentation I’m going to take it in a new direction. The theme of my presentation is going to be about what are the tools that exist today that could create that “Enterprising” culture needed in the future, and what actions the student population needs to take to not be left behind. This is going to be a very different presentation for me then any I’ve done before. I won’t be selling my group, or trying to compete against a set of criteria, instead I get to be subtle, employ video, and speak from improvisation.
The model I’ve formed for this presentation is that the culture needed for an Enterprising Canada has seven elements broken down into two categories: Tools, and Actions. Tools represent the social ideas necessary that are broken down into technological tools that enable them on a new scale. Actions are the elements of our life-styles that actually put the Tools to use.
Not surprisingly, a lot of the different Tools I say are necessary for an Enterprising Canada have already been major factors in Open Source Software and Web2.0: Community, Collaboration, Sharing, and Discussion. In the presentation I represent each of the ideas through: Unconferences, Wikis, Creative Commons, and Blogs respectively. The reason I do that is because at this point in time, I think these are the four tenets that are the basis of any culture that supports innovation and new ideas. So while the 4 ideas are immaterial and abstract, in the present day, the four tools are examples of 100% free and accessible ways for anyone to contribute and be a part of it all.
The Actions that take the Tools and make them useful are: Participation(/action), communication, and education. So Action in this model is the human element that holds all the power to actually develop something positive using these tools. To put it into the big picture, if a person isn’t involved in all three of these actions, then only mediocre results will be achieved. I will probably include into the presentation that a strong motivation and drive needs to underlay these three actions as well.
I have 3 days to improve the presentation and make sure this message is refined and delivered clearly. If anyone has some goods points of advice on making a presentation impressionable I’d very much appreciate it.
