Entrepreneurs Exchange, Leeds Beckett University

Ella Woodward and Sir Charles Dunstone Entrepreneur’s Exchange

Ella Woodward and Sir Charles Dunstone Entrepreneurs Exchange

Earlier this month Ella Woodward and Sir Charles Dunstone spoke at the Leeds event for Entrepreneurs Exchange. The event sponsored by UKTI’s Exporting is Great and HSBC bank saw many events across UK cities held concurrently.

Ella Woodward is the heir of one of the daughters of the Sainsbury’s family. Her father is the former MP and cabinet member Shaun Woodward. Ella attended St Andrews University in Scotland but following graduation fell seriously ill gaining significant weight. Bed bound Ella started to develop gluten free healthy eating recipes and publishing to a blog. Ella now has 25,000 followers on Twitter and 6 members of staff. Deliciously Ella not only publishes the online healthy eating food blog but also some best selling books. Not bad for a 23 year old entrepreneur. Her advice is to be yourself, be enthusiastic and creative.

Following on from Ella was Sir Charles Dunstone. The billionaire mobile telecoms tycoon is not just the founder of the Car Phone Warehouse but also TalkTalk the telephony, TV and broadband provider. Sir Charles stated to be an entrepreneur you have to be a little thick. He went on to state he had just employed an executive who was Oxford educated completing a degree in Politics, Economics and Philosophy. This particular chap is so intelligent he often analyses data and makes one decision only to reverse the decision by analysing another set of data.

Sir Charles explained how his approach was to have a clear vision of where you are heading and stick to the course. You will get obstacles and barriers in the way but all you need to do is to find ways to go over them or round them. That’s why it pays to be a little thick as a entrepreneur otherwise you would never get started. Not bad from a person who is one of the world’s top 1000 richest people and a member of the Chipping Norton set.

Finally, Sir Charles talked about the importance of looking at your product and service from the customer’s point of view. Talk to your customers and listen to what they have to say so you can incrementally improve your business. Always look to simplify your business because as you grow things become more complicated. Without your customers you don’t have a business!

 

Communication Without Chaos

Teachersanywhere.com

Teachersanywhere.com – Connecting Teachers inside and outside school

Are you spending all your time sending emails? Round robin emails are a nightmare. Some people feel they should not be cc’d, others feel excluded when they haven’t been cc’d. Then there is the dreaded “reply to all”. So how can this chaos be solved and how can we collaborate better in teams? Progress and activities can end up in silos instead of being visible to the whole team.

Teachersanywhere brings all you need for teamwork in one place. Conversations happen in chats between teams of teachers. You are not met by an empty inbox. A powerful search allows you to look for other teachers’ skills and communication channels. It makes you more productive and more transparent as a school.

You make teams on Teachersanywhere which make communicating with the right department, faculty or year group obvious. Teachersanywhere also works on your mobile phone, making it a great way to stay connected.

Teachersanywhere is a new type of communication for teachers. What is different is, teachers can join teams and then join the conversation. You can also share links and search for other people’s skills when you need help. Only people in your team will see the communications. It’s totally private and secure. Everything you post on Teachersanywhere is searchable, making things easy to find. Teachersanywhere works the way you work, so if you are on the go you can start on your desktop and then pick it up on your mobile.

Send fewer emails, have fewer meetings. Remember, teams do amazing things!

Your can sign up here and start connecting with other teachers in and outside your school:

http://www.teachersanywhere.com

 

Moodle Moot Ireland & UK 2016, London

Martin Dougiamas Moodle Founder with Sean Gilligan Webanywhere Founder

Martin Dougiamas, Founder, Moodle with Sean Gilligan, Founder, Webanywhere

London’s Park Plaza Hotel recently played host to the annual Moodlemoot for Ireland and the U.K. People descended from around the world for the Moodle convention on the Thames in the capital. Over 350 people attended from all walks of life, including course creators, administrators, developers and business decision-makers. Whilst the majority of the audience were from the further education and higher education sectors, 25% of people came from the corporate sector.

Moodle is the world’s largest open-source learning platform, and a new release is imminent – Moodle 3.1 will be released soon, and the priorities for the Moodle development roadmap include:

  • New default theme with no blocks and Bootstrap 4
  • Activity module overhauls
  • Easier integrations
  • Strong mobile support

Moodle tips

Matt Porritt MD of Catalyst, Melbourne, Australia.

  • Always upgrade your Moodle. Every version of Moodle gets better.
  • Challenge your staff and ask if you can see the latest Moodle backups.
  • There is a Moodle plugin for just about anything so this is worth searching for.
  • You can turn off some of the advanced functions of Moodle to make the user experience easier to use.
  • LMS analytics is becoming a big thing, providing you have enough Moodle data to poll. Analytics can be used to generate management information for student interventions and to inform which courses are working and therefore how to enhance your learning design.

Moodle has three main influencers for the product roadmap. A lot of resources in Moodle HQ have been placed in Moodle for Mobile and there are some huge benefits for Moodle here as lots of the Moodle modules work in offline mode. Moodle mobile apps can be branded for institutions that want them and then rapidly deployed to the Apple App Store and to Google Play.

Benn Cass and Conor Gilligan at Moodle Moot Ireland and UK, London, 2016

Benn Cass and Conor Gilligan at Moodle Moot Ireland and UK, London, 2016

Moodle in universities

The Open University’s Jenny Gray reflected on 10 years of Moodle at the OU. Moodle is still the learning platform of choice for them and has recently been chosen again by the OU based on student experience. The OU is now on their 3rd redesign of Moodle to allow for greater personalisation and flexible learning pathways. Furthermore, they have included streamlined tools in Moodle for better student support.

Jenny described some of the priorities as being critical feedback, showcasing work and comments. The OU has 20 developers plus business analysts and associated project managers managing their Moodle platform. They release Moodle updates on a quarterly basis. The OU’s Moodle averages 30k visits per day and they have over 100,000 users on their platform.

So what next for the OU? They’re focussed mostly on a quicker route to going live for content. They are also looking at improving their collaborative learning tools alongside their media player.

The OU’s wish list includes:

  • Better search
  • Single student profiles
  • In page discussions
  • Learning analytics
  • Progress indicators
  • Student archive

The pace of change of tech means the OU now review their learning on a 2-yearly basis. The OU are focused on infrastructure as a service and the benefits of going to the cloud. Going to the cloud will allow the OU to deploy with less downtime. The OU are one of the biggest deployments of Moodle out there, and it is seen by some that their decision to choose Moodle has since led to significant growth in the Moodle Project.

Chris Meadows shared Manchester Metropolitan University’s 5 year journey with Moodle. Moodle is the hub of the student learning experience for their students. Access to library systems and attendance registrations are all glued together via Moodle. They survey 35,000 students across 8 facilities to inform their future Moodle developments. Manchester Met have developed an automated audit script which runs each night on the Moodle. The results of the script produce a compliance checklist whereby learning technologists can review the quality of courses and engagement levels. This evidence is then used to train academics on how to better develop courses. Best practice checklists have then been developed to improve the quality of the courses and the learning experience. Moodle templates have been developed to help with the consistency of the learning experience.

Student voice is taken very seriously at Manchester and the top 3 issues from students were as follows:

  • Poor communication
  • Resources being made available before lectures
  • Some materials of poor quality
Moodlers at Moodle Moot IE UK 2016, London

Moodlers at Moodle Moot IE UK 2016, London

At Portsmouth University the theme of feedback continued. The need for feedback they thought was more important than the marks themselves. Students at Portsmouth need to give their feedback to get their marks released. Of course, the beauty of Moodle for students is that they can speed up or slow down the lectures!

The overriding themes of the Moot were feedback and analytics. We must get the right data to the right people at the right time. The Moodle Moot gave good insights into the latest trends and key drivers in educational technology. Moodle and the Moodlers demonstrated the Moodle community is as strong as ever.

Peter Wilkinson Speaks at Inaugural Tech Dinner, KPMG, Leeds

Peter Wilkinson Yorkshire Tech Entrepreneur

Peter Wilkinson Yorkshire Tech Entrepreneur

Graham Pearce, Director at KPMG in Leeds, invited me to the inaugural Tech Leeds dinner with guest speaker Peter Wilkinson. Peter started off in the tech business back in 1974 and, whilst not being very academic at school, he started his first business selling potato chips to students before it was shut down. His costs were a potato peeler and and some potatoes – he still claims it to be one of his highest margin businesses to date. Whilst Peter was not the most academic at school, he probably had the most pocket money.

On the issue of Entrepreneurship – “Are Entrepreneurs born or can it be learnt?” – Peter believes it is something you are born with. Peter’s success has meant the creation of over 7,000 jobs and this is one of the things he is most proud of. His philosophy was to start a business, get it to a certain size and then sell it or hand it over to professional managers for the repetitive operational management. Peter is very much a creative personality full of both ideas and the determination and energy to make things happen. He admits it isn’t getting any easier, and you need to get the timing in business correct. Sometimes you can be too early.

Peter got involved with game-activation with Sky set top boxes and pressing the red button. This is now commonplace, but at the time it was ahead of the market and so it failed. In failure, Peter expresses, you need to be able to write off the failures, learn from them and start again.

Peter’s involvement in telehealth and MedTech came from the fact that a work colleagues was spending ridiculous amounts of time visiting the hospital for health checks. Focusing on the problem, Peter developed an application to automate this process without the need to go to hospital, saving time, money and the inconvenience.

At 61, Peter is nearing the end of his career, and he openly admits his next two projects will be his last. One project is to put Wi-Fi networks into football stadia and the other is a telehealth app aimed at reducing the burden on the NHS. The NHS now has 70% of beds taken up by the elderly and the more of this care which can be done outside the hospital, the better for the healthcare system, which is already under pressure.

Peter is very humble in his achievements and downplays his intellect – he only got one A level in Ancient History and failed everything else! Peter is also a proper Yorkshireman, telling it how it is with no waffle – he is direct and to the point.

The founder of Freeserve has been involved in many tech success stories in Yorkshire including Sports Internet, Planet Online and InTechnologies, and he bought Hull City Football Club before  selling it a few years later after Hull’s promotion to the Premier League. Peter has also made a donation to Leeds University and the incubator facility, helping seed fund many university spin-outs and start ups which show much promise.

On TechNorth and the Northern Powerhouse, Peter says the North needs a “Boris Johnson-like figure”, and without it there will be too many egos and clashing of agendas rather than the joined up thinking of a figurehead to drive it forward. Peter considers himself politically neutral but admits the transport infrastructure needs to be better to make the Northern Powerhouse happen.

Peter, when questioned by KPMG’s Dermot Callinan (Partner and Head of UK Private Client), explained the importance of respect and good old-fashioned traditional values. He also warned of the entitlement attitude and the potential threat of the emerging economies, where people have to work hard or they are fired. Peter stated he would like to see more big businesses and corporates buying from small to medium sized enterprises. He feels we have evolved into a risk-averse culture where corporates only buy from corporates.

On the issues of talent, Peter commented on the fact that most talented people are already running a business. The people left are hard to find and are a rare breed. Dermot commented that this talent is really the differentiator between growing a business with A-players and not making the grade. It was openly admitted that there is a shortage of tech skills in Leeds, and an example of this is Sky Bet, a company Peter sold to Sky. Sky Bet is now having to find its tech talent not only in Leeds but also in Sheffield due to shortages.

In 1974, Peter explained, tech was quite narrow, but now it is all-consuming and very broad. There is great demand for tech talent and it cuts across many industries – be it smart TVs, MedTech, FinTech, EdTech – the list goes on. So when you talk about tech, you need to ask what sort of tech do you actually mean, as all businesses are becoming tech businesses.

All in all, it was great to meet and connect with other Yorkshire tech businesses such as York Data Services, AQL, Fleet On Demand (FOD) and more. Peter shared words of wisdom from someone who is very much a private person – he rarely does public speaking. Peter joked this is the first tech dinner talk and probably his last. Peter prefers to spend his time with the peace and quiet of the North York Moors. Silicon Dale, after all, does not have the earthquakes that you get in Silicon Valley!

Yorkshire Post UKTI International Business Roundtable

Exporting Yorkshire

Exporting Yorkshire

The need for the right skills dominated a roundtable discussion which I attended at the Yorkshire Post headquarters in Leeds.

A group of Yorkshire businessmen from a diverse range of industries met with Greg Wright, Deputy Business Editor of the Yorkshire Post, for a discussion on International Business, sponsored by UK Trade and Investment.

Alongside the Post’s delegation other people attending the roundtable included Stephen Crow (Business Development Partner at Clarion solicitors), David Wragg (Operations Director of Hargreaves Industrial Services), Mark Parks (Managing Director of Boston Air Group), Colin Russell (UKTI), Jim Hart) CEO at OneGlobal) and Daniel Hughes (Director at Turner & Townsend).

Starting off proceedings, Greg asked questions regarding selling the Yorkshire brand overseas. Do foreign firms buy from you because you are a Yorkshire business? Daniel Hughes, of Turner & Townsend, responded that it wasn’t the fact that the business was Yorkshire-based which decided why customers should buy. However, Daniel went on to state that the region did have positive connotations around the character of the people of the County and their trustworthiness. OneGlobal’s Jim Hart added that being a UK business in terms of USA trade was deemed as a negative, because Americans preferred to buy local.

UKTI advisor Colin Russell added that Indians might know of the “brand” Yorkshire due to the deep roots of cricket. Nonetheless, Colin went on to state that, fundamentally, customers want to know you have the knowledge and skills to deliver a quality service. The Yorkshire brand adds colour to the UK story but it’s ultimately about what you deliver. Mark Parks, founder of Boston Air (a recruitment business focused on the aeronautic industry), went on to say it’s easiest to start exporting British into North West Europe. David Wragg of Hargreaves Industrials went on to state that the Yorkshire accent is notable, and people do ask where the accent is from when you’re abroad.

Greg then challenged the group on the importance of getting the right skills. Daniel responded that the key barriers to doing international business were mobilisation issues. Jim Hart stated the importance of selling in the local language and having a local website presence. When you are trading with a foreign country, you’ve got to be committed to it and localise your products and services.

Exporting Yorkshire

Exporting Yorkshire

Some of the bigger challenges around international business, highlighted by Mark Parks, were deemed to be around the issues of regulation. Another businessman added the importance of understanding the culture of the country and how to deal with people.

Everyone attending the roundtable agreed that service exports, which were once traditionally done by the largest plc companies in the UK, are now being seen by mid-market firms. Quite often, what happens is suppliers follow their clients from one country to another and this is how internationalisation occurs. UKTI suggested the importance of Yorkshire businesses collaborating and learning from each other.

Daniel Hughes went on to reflect on the importance of having the right partners and being very selective when it comes to finding business partners overseas. Once you find the right partners you can then scale up your business.

Greg’s final question was to ask us what tips we would give to other businesses looking to export around the world.

Here’s a few snippets of the best pieces of advice for going International:

  • UKTI advised to go for easiest markets first e.g. North West Europe.
  • Jim Hart – Commit to one market at a time.
  • David Wragg – Go to the top of an organisation when selling abroad and find the right decision makers.
  • Stephen Crow – Make sure you talk to UKTI.

Personally, I think businesses should start small and scale fast. The difference between a good business and a great business is whether it is international. We now live in a global village and, with cheap air travel and the Internet, it has never been a better time to get started.

Connecting knowledge with those who need it…

Research shows that more than 70% of employees use search engines to learn things. They use their smart phones for just-in-time solutions to improve their performance. Of course searching on the web does not give your company’s specific context.

How often do you send an article link or a YouTube video in a email for a colleague to see? What if you could track this across your organisation? What if you could see what other colleagues are searching for? What if all learners became content curators?

We all have a calling in life and quite often this is our vocation. Of course, if you love your work you’re always trying to get better through learning from others. That’s why, over a number of years, we created Promatum. Pro in latin means “In” and Matum means “The Call”. Promatum is a tool that helps you and your peers improve in your given calling.

Promatum provides just-in-time, social learning, to take your organisation’s performance to the next level. We created Promatum in collaboration with Fortune 500 companies to enable a bottom-up approach to learning.

The above diagram demonstrates how new members of staff need the traditional LMS to provide them with induction and compliance training. Once a member of staff is established and competent in their job, less formal learning can be used to drive value.  Promatum can be used to capture the knowledge of the top 20% of your staff and then share this with B-players to turn them into A-players. Perhaps the platform could even help C-players become A-players! Equally, you can share knowledge outside your enterprise within your supply chains or distribution channels using the same technology and generating similar competitive advantage.

Promatum allows you to:

  • Harness devices already in your workplace
  • Capture knowledge on the job
  • Promote contextual learning
  • Deliver “bite-size” learning
  • Promote sharing of knowledge
  • Embed learning within daily routines

What’s unique about mobile devices in a learning context is that most people already check in several times per day, as part of their daily routine, so they’re the perfect vehicle for embedding learning as a day-to-day activity rather than something for training days and other “special occasions”.

The only sustainable competitive advantage is the ability to learn and apply the right stuff faster. Using smartphones to deliver learning has been so effective that participants now take their courses in about 45% less time.
Some of the benefits of Extended Learning Enterprise are:

  1. Quickly update customers and resellers about new product launches, or changes to products (e.g. software)
  2. Track compliance of franchises and other VARs to ensure they are providing the best advice to customers
  3. Reduction in support costs using e-learning
  4. Creating an active community around your product and services
  5. Learning and Development becomes a profit centre as they are able to provide sales training to their VAR

You can learn more about Promatum, a new product by Webanywhere, at www.promatum.com