Sorry for being a bit late with this but after coming back on sunday I seem to have caught a virus (not the digital kind). Anyway, here are some thoughts on the Entrepreneurship Summit 2011 in Berlin.

Useless freebies don’t work

This might be one of my pet peeves. Free ball pens are great. Not so much if mentioned ball pens suck. The ones given out at the Entrepreneurship Summit 2011 looked pretty slick, almost like old school pens really. So I pulled off the cap and wanted to put it on the back of the pen. Won’t fit. Where do I put the cap so I wont lose it then? I put it somewhere on my clothes and start the first writing test.

Surprise number 2: This actually isn’t a ball pen but a rollerball pen. Meaning it uses a kind of ink that is a lot more liquid than your regular ball pen ink. Meaning one will probably smudge all over the place. A hidden bonus of this: I saw quite a few people with blue fingers (including me).

So what do you do with a ball pen that isn’t a ball pen and generally is pretty useless? I don’t know but I can tell you what you probably won’t do: use it. And since nobody will use it the grassroots effect (“oh hey what’s an Entrepreneurship Summit as it reads on your ball pen?”) is lost.

Do it yourself networking

What intrigued me the most about the description of the event were the mentions of networking events. It seemed to me the hosts are really keen on bringing people together and helping entrepreneur-hopefuls building a network they can go from. There were mentions of ‘speed dating’ events, you had to register so you had a chance to be paired with the right people and so on.

Pretty much nothing of this happened as far as I can tell. Granted I was about an hour late to the networking event on saturday evening. But all I did see was people stepping on a little stage and telling the others about their idea and who their are searching for in a few sentences. Sure this isn’t exactly nothing but this aspect can and needs to be vastly improved.

A few ideas:

• give people a topic and make them talk to each other for a few minutes about it (I hear something like that has been done in one of the impulse groups)
• give out soft balls to people and let them throw it into the crowd - whoever catches it is your conversation partner for the next few minutes
• actually do the speed dating thing
• do all of the above throughout the whole event and use it as a replacement for the completely pointless podium discussions

Solid event, needs improvement

Don’t take my mostly ranty post as a sign that I didn’t like the whole event. Quite the opposite. Take everything I didn’t mention as a thumbs up. There were some really interesting impulse groups, I met a few interesting people, I learned quite a lot and the whole thing gave me a whole bunch of new ideas.

If you are thinking about the entrepreneurship thing yourself this definitely is an event you shouldn’t miss. You will get the chance to meet people that do or did exactly the same thing and know the problems and a few tricks to get around them.

But my number 1 complaint still stands: the actual networking really paled in comparison to the amount of talk about how important networking is. This needs to be changed for the Entrepreneurship Summit 2012. If it is this will be big step towards an event I can wholeheartedly recommend.