Today ‘Virtual Silicon Valley’ platform creator Grow VC has launched a national university program in the US to ignite student entrepreneurs with the entrepreneurial spark. The online venture community and micro funding network has grown to over 10,000 entrepreneurs, investors and experts from 200 different countries.

“We see the student demographic as a cornerstone in building the future of entrepreneurship and venture capital”, says Grow VC Chairman Jouko Ahvenainen. “It’s the students that are going to lead value creation in the new era, it’s them that have to point us in the right direction and lead the change. It all starts at the grassroots,” Ahvenainen continues.

The Community Partner program covers 70 campuses from California to New York, from Washington State to Florida. The program activates undergraduates, graduate students and other academic professionals from schools such as Berkeley, University of Southern California, University of Colorado Boulder, Georgetown, the University of Texas and dozens more. The network has a reach of over potentially 10 000 entrepreneurs, which represents the programs short term goal.

“Students have a pragmatic attitude, applying trial and error to business can serve as a valuable business instinct for building ventures for the future,” points out Grow VC CEO Valto Loikkanen. “Grow VC has always been about democratizing startup funding for when the ‘Facebook generation’ grows up, which makes students and student demographic a clear focus for building the future of investing and startups. It’s with the students that we want to build the future step by step,” Loikkanen emphasizes.

The Community Partners will be incentivized to grow their own personal network, within campuses but also with partners in the startup ecosystem. “The program aims to weave together a net of entrepreneurial campuses, to further boost getting the right initiatives and startups off the ground in the US for more job growth”, elaborates Mr. Ahvenainen. For student entrepreneurs the program offers tools to advance their own ventures and activities, but also engage in building a support infrastructure for student entrepreneurs.

“We are looking forward to seeing the drive and talent of this entrepreneurial group,” states Mr. Loikkanen. “For those that exceed, they can earn a good position within a growing entrepreneurial organization in the future.”

More SMLXL posts on Grow Venture Community (GrowVC) and the crisis of venture funding

Related articles

• Dr. Burton Lee from Stanford Joins Grow VC Advisory Board (growvc.com)
• Topical Discussion on the Regulation in Crowdfunding (growvc.com)
• How can you use the updated Grow VC service? (growvc.com)
• Grow VC Celebrates Its First 10 000 Members (growvc.com)

The presentation dealt with this idea: That mobile communications does not have to be a tactical endeavor, it can be a deep strategic one enabling companies to run leaner, to reach audiences in new and novel ways, to redefine a company organizationally, and create new markets with new revenues. In ‘creating assets and access in the intention economy’ I challenged our thinking in how mobile communications plays the key role in this rapidly evolving story.

Existing models of crowd behaviour  treat moving masses of humanity as though they were fluids. This works, up to a point. But it often fails to predict the changes that happen as a crowd’s density increases and its movement becomes chaotic.

Apparently marching soldiers will automatically break step on a suspension bridge – and over the last 5 years or so I have been fascinated by all sorts of participatory cultures – here is a selection of posts that explores such a fascinating and increasingly important area of investigation

Did the Church see Gutenberg coming? I asked this question recently at an event on innovation and disruption. Those of you that are fans of Blackadder, let me use the comedic twinning of Rowan Atkinson as Bishop Blackadder and his side-kick Tony Robinson as Baldrick.

So Baldrick comes running into Bishop Blackadders bedroom as he is preparing for his day

Blackadder: ahhhh there you are Baldrick, I wondered when you might turn up

Baldrick: sorry sir, I was out last night in the Tavern

Blackadder: the Tavern Baldrick, have you taken leave of your senses

Baldrick: well no sir, but I ended up over-hearing a conversation between two men, a Johannes Gutenberg and some other geezer, that, that, that, that,

(Baldrick pauses)

Blackadder: c’mon man out with it

Baldrick: that could change the whole power base of the church sir – Gutenberg has taken a wine press and he’s going to print bibles on it sir

Blackadder just stares at Baldrick, and slaps him around the head, knocking him over and then kicks him

Blackadder: POPPYCOCK Bladrick (turning to face the window looking out onto the town of Mainz and its surrounding countryside) As Bishop Baldrick, I rule everything I see, and even that which I don’t. How on earth do you think that some fool up in a garret in Mainz with a convertible wine press is going to reform the church, and remove our strangle hold over the whole of Europe, hmmmmm?

This particular question has a certain relevancy if not urgency today, as it was through Gutenberg’s invention we as a society moved from the Dark Ages into the Reformation. The Church controlled all, its omnipotence felt by every single European man woman and child. Yet within a brief decade of the printing of the 42-Line bible and the facsimile re-creation of Gutenberg’s printing press, between 8 – 20 million books had been printed, whereas before, none had existed outside of a monastery. Martin Luther unleashed of the power of the printing press to decouple the Church from its divine power base, whilst simultaneously challenging political stability.

The lesson is – when new communication tools are not only invented but ubiquitously adopted, they can become a tool wielded for profound societal and political change, if society wills it.

So lets ask another question; which business, which industry, which NGO or political organization, democratic or otherwise has not been touched by the impact of our most recent communications revolution? In a breath it seems, businesses defined by their socialness, community, and peer to peer interactivity have erupted in complete violation of the orthodoxy of traditional business, and how that business is made: controlled access to stuff, to information. This is the Gestalt Switch – once we were atomized but connected up to each other by big media but not across each other, today that power has eroded, people are using communication technology to get what they want and need from each other rather than through existing organisations and institutions.

In 2005, Facebook, and YouTube were born – we were aware of the emergence of digital communications but that was seen from afar, there but not here. Today Facebook has a congregation of 500 million people connecting and getting stuff done though its platform, Youtube uploads 20 hours of audio visual content every minute of every day of every year, Flickr holds the largest repository of still images anywhere in the world – but why all this sharing? Because, as USC Professor Henry Jenkins states, an expert on participatory cultures, we were ready for it. Linux is a co-created operating system, (which companies like IBM use) generating huge sums of money for those that build businesses around its services even though the operating code is free and the people that write the code do so for free. From a traditional standpoint it is illogical, yet it works.

At the same time we are using the words social media and social networking, which drip off our lips like an adman would say 60 second TV spot 15 years ago, it seems people are all atwitter about twitter and the CBI produces a report about how employees using “social media” during their working hours are losing the UK millions. The truth is the connection of participatory cultures, socialness and a communications revolution in the true context of our age has been misunderstood by many.

In The Enterprise of the Future a report published by IBM in 2006 – their survey of CEO’s revealed that 8/10 CEO’s saw significant change ahead and yet the gap between expected levels of change plus the ability to manage it had tripled. This is natural because as a new economy takes hold, as a consequence of the old one faltering, it unleashes a powerful set of forces that cleave the fabric of the economy along fault lines, consequently there is a catastrophic resistance to change. For example, social media from a business context is easy to dismiss, it is looked at with idling curiosity, or downright mistrust in the C-suite as it is not a core part of daily grown up business, sadly this is the same mistake which the church made in misunderstanding Gutenberg in his garret in Mainz.

The reality is people are a highly participatory social species, we are designed to work in aggregates, this is different to the logic that created firms perfected for industrial production. We are in the process of renegotiating that power relationship. What companies face today is a design problem and part of that problem is understanding that embedding socialness into the core of what makes a company work successfully is very different to thinking about social media as an addendum to what it does. It requires a new philosophy, language, media and communications literacy, tools and processes. There are companies which whether it be automotive; Local Motors, venture funding; GrowVC, scientific innovation; innocentive, YourEncore, or Topcoder which has NASA as a client, books; Amazon or book mooch, mobile marketing; Qustodian, trading; ebay, that have all embedded socialness into the DNA of the company to improve commercial success. So is it social media or social business – as answering that question might be more important than you think.

Related articles

• Trend for 2011: Collaborative story-telling on social media (reportr.net)
• Facebook Nation, Facebook World (lewrockwell.com)
• Gutenberg In The Middle East (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
• The Gutenberg Bible. (jwitness.wordpress.com)

People are often mourning the loss of a way of life in which they were part of a community that had grown organically over the generations… Unlike the planners and architects who moved them around as if they were pawns in a chess game, they understand that communities are not created by ordering removal vans simply to transplant people from one location to another – not if they are to have a cohesiveness that makes sense to those who live within in them.

So wrote Gilda O’Neill, who is sadly no longer with us. She was referencing her life experience growing up in the East End of London.

In the Miracle of Hudson Street by Malcolm Gladwell he talks about Jane Jacobs,

In the early nineteen-sixties, Jane Jacobs lived on Hudson Street, in Greenwich Village, near the intersection of Eighth Avenue and Bleecker Street. It was then, as now, a charming district of nineteenth-century tenements and town houses, bars and shops, laid out over an irregular grid, and Jacobs loved the neighborhood. In her 1961 masterpiece, “ The Death and Life of Great American Cities ,” she rhapsodized about the White Horse Tavern down the block, home to Irish longshoremen and writers and intellectuals – a place where, on a winter’s night, as “the doors open, a solid wave of conversation and animation surges out and hits you.”

Her Hudson Street had Mr. Slube, at the cigar store, and Mr. Lacey, the locksmith, and Bernie, the candy-store owner, who, in the course of a typical day, supervised the children crossing the street, lent an umbrella or a dollar to a customer, held on to some keys or packages for people in the neighborhood, and “lectured two youngsters who asked for cigarettes.” The street had “bundles and packages, zigzagging from the drug store to the fruit stand and back over to the butcher’s,” and “teenagers, all dressed up, are pausing to ask if their slips show or their collars look right.” It was, she said, an urban ballet.

And why was it a miracle?

The miracle of Hudson Street, according to Jacobs, was created by the particular configuration of the streets and buildings of the neighborhood. Jacobs argued that when a neighborhood is oriented toward the street, when sidewalks are used for socializing and play and commerce, the users of that street are transformed by the resulting stimulation: they form relationships and casual contacts they would never have otherwise.

And going further Gladwell expands

The West Village, she pointed out, was blessed with a mixture of houses and apartments and shops and offices and industry, which meant that there were always people “outdoors on different schedules and… in the place for different purposes.” It had short blocks, and short blocks create the greatest variety in foot traffic. It had lots of old buildings, and old buildings have the low rents that permit individualized and creative uses. And, most of all, it had people, cheek by jowl, from every conceivable walk of life. Sparely populated suburbs may look appealing, she said, but without an active sidewalk life, without the frequent, serendipitous interactions of many different people, “there is no public acquaintanceship, no foundation of public trust, no cross-connections with the necessary people–and no practice or ease in applying the most ordinary techniques of city public life at lowly levels.”

Gladwell’s point is about space, proximity, communication and trust in the context of the failure of the office vs. the success of Hudson Street.

The area that Rory represents is vast, communities can be small, as he says the problems are distance and isolation. This means broadband companies are reluctant to lay the cable to deliver broadband – not cost efficient. But as we know connectivity makes commerce possible. And without connectivity, communities dwindle even further for social as well as commercial reasons.

Broadband would allow our businesses to follow our local fishing supply shop, which does £1m of sales a year out of the door but £7m online. Farmers could fill forms online; Lake District B&Bs could market themselves in Japan; and “creative” industries that depend on fast internet speeds could grow. Parkinson’s patients could talk to their neurologist by videolink without leaving home (and grandparents could talk to their grandchildren in Canada); children could take classes which they couldn’t find in the district. Village shops could collaborate online to increase their purchasing power; village halls could share bookings; medical teams could exchange emergency calls more efficiently. People might decide again to work and bring their families up in villages.

£100m has been invested in broadband in Cornwall, but Cumbria is twice as big, with geographic challenges. This where the design challenge comes in – an intractable dilemma. Commercial companies say ‘non’, based upon their criteria, which has real social and commercial consequences. So what happened next?

But our Eden communities may have the solution. In Great Asby, one volunteer discovered there was already fibre, paid for by the taxpayer, for the school. The school let him splice off the fibre to a cabinet that he calls a “parish pump”. From that he ran a wireless network, with transmitters in the church tower and one, powered by solar panels, on a dead tree to reach the outlying farms. He has persuaded 70% of the village to sign up and is making enough money (as an unpaid volunteer) to upgrade the network. Local farmers have agreed to lay the fibre, at a fraction of the commercial cost. This is not a just impressive technology, it’s astonishing community action. And it suggests a model for rural Britain. The 130 activists who drove to Great Asby are now aiming to replicate it in 100 more villages. They have established a new website – though some of them have to drive to Penrith to log on. Libby, in Kirkby Stephen, is photographing and mapping all existing telecoms cabinets. Freddy, in Morland, is exploring alternative technologies from microwave transmitters and wireless hubs, to laying fibre in sewers. Five out of six farmers around Crosby Ravensworth have offered to forego wayleave charges and help dig trenches. Kate, in Stanwix, is training people to get online. Daniel, in Alston, is piloting medical tests from homes.

This is what happens when communities are empowered, when they are driven to create something for themselves. Traditional orthodoxies don’t need to apply. And of course the economics of community run networks is different, because communities can sign up well over 70% of a village to use broadband, they are much more attractive economic propositions. But if companies don’t invest, communities will bypass them entirely and build, own and run their own networks. The market orthodoxy wants us to behave in a certain – for their benefit. The Eden community demonstrates that designing a different solution, means they can change the rules and deliver a service that probably is more sustainable.

Dave Evans

Who gets it and who doesn’t and why? (I say the biggest challenge companies have in adapting is more cultural than anything else.)

I believe that we all “get it” but that there is of course a caveat to this. We all “get” social media, for example, when we are shopping and want the best deal, when we want to know, in advance, that this thing we are about to buy really works for the purpose for which we intend to use it. We want to know where to look for the best jobs, and to be referred or introduced to the best contacts to improve our chances for getting those jobs. On the subject of advertising–being as it is the channel through which we might actually learn of these products and other opportunities–when we are relaxing at home we don’t want interruptions that take us away from the programs we enjoy watching. In this sense, we all “get it.”

However, this odd transformation takes place when we walk into our offices, when we don our “work hats.” Suddenly, we expect everyone to want to pay attention to us (and only us), to show an interest in what we make, and to go out and buy it: To see things our way, and to readily shift attention when our spot or print ad or dinner-time telemarketing call or highway billboard presents itself.

“But wait,” as we say in the business, “there’s more.” We also expect people–customers, employees, suppliers–to do what we say simply because we said it. How much justification, unbiased proof, or fact-based evidence can one really put into a 30 second spot or half page (mostly image) advertisement? As an example of just how little, consider the typical US pharmaceutical print ad: The primary ad components are amazingly free of actual data…but flip the page in the magazine and you’ll see 8.5 x 11 inches of fine print, which ironically contains the actual information needed to properly evaluate benefits conveyed by the smiling couple in the visual ad.

So, there is this whole notion of control–over attention, over the message, over the interpretation of the message, over employees and how they are incented to work–that in many ways, at a practical level, really shows who gets it and who doesn’t. And, it’s often the same people, just in a different context: A middle aged professional walks into an electronics store, wanting to see what’s new and innovative, and to be told, in straight terms, which of these devices makes sense given his stated needs and lifestyle. That same guy walks into the office on Monday and barks at his subordinates, expecting them to do his bidding because “that’s how we’ve always done it” and with little more actual authority than a passing reference to the “SVP” that follows his name on the office door: Same person, operating alternately between “getting it” and “not.”

Social technology disrupts authority, and it does so without regard for the particular subject. The question of “who gets it” and “who doesn’t,” when looked at this way, becomes more a question of “Is it convenient for me to “get it” right now?” This is of course the driver in the push for social technology, embedded in the fabric of the marketplace, of the workplace and in our social infrastructure: By making information available everywhere–regardless of who the actors are–then collaborative behaviors are reinforced across the full range of contexts. It’s difficult, for example, to hold a position–indefinitely and based on only authority–that contravenes the facts when the facts are known to all, and the fact that (we/they) all know this is itself known to everyone.

This is what “Social Media Marketing: The Next Generation of Business Engagement” is all about: As a business leader–where my prior book was distinctly for marketers, I wrote this book for C-level and similar organizational leaders across all disciplines–your employees, partners, suppliers and customers have knowledge that can make your products and services better, that can create a stronger brand and add economic value to your organization. Social technology, applied at a business level, is about creating a strong organizational culture that thrives on collaboration, that listens to customers, and that builds for itself a long-term pathway to profits and growth. But, you have to be willing to operate collaboratively.

So, a personal heartfelt perspective.

My driving ideal remains: To see my son and his generation grow up in a world with less interruption, where the information needed to make a smart choice is available. This is, for me, what the web, and now the advent of social technology is all about. When I talk about “engagement” in terms of business, for example, I talk about it not in terms of “engaging with an ad by clicking it” but rather by “engaging with a business b becoming a part of it.” That is an entirely different proposition, and one that radically redefines the objectives of organizational leadership.

I think it brings people closer to your work?

In the end, we are all a part of this, and we all have a stake in it: Social technology is, in a sense, the infrastructure that will facilitate realization of the solutions needed by the next generation of thinkers, leaders and people everywhere. By connecting, friending, sharing…we can get to know each other, and learn to operate our markets in ways that raise value everywhere through appropriate transparency rather than seeking to exploit information (resources) for the benefit of a few.

If there is one book you should buy to understand what next generation business engagement looks like, using social media then, this is the book. You can follow Dave on twitter @evansdave. Digital Voodoo is Dave’s company

What has changed and what has not!

What has changed since 2007 when I wrote the first book (released in 2008) is that social technology has gone mainstream. As I was writing the first book, Twitter was in use by primarily among digital technology fans and those concerned with the intersection of society and technology: SXSW 2007 was one of the first really notable Twitter events that started to catch mainstream attention, still far in advance of the big uptick in member growth that happened in 2009. Similar story for Facebook: In mid-2007, with 50 million or so members globally, Facebook opened its API to developers, driving new social technology. In 2008 membership crossed 100 million and in 2010 it crossed 500 million.

I started writing the second book in early 2010 while working with 2020Media (Public Relations) in India. It became really clear that this next wave of social technology was truly global at a societal–and not just technology production–level. I saw people doing things with social technology in India, Asia and South America, where I work with video community startup Looppa, that were essentially identical to what was happening in Europe and North America. People were playing off of each other, sharing ideas and experiences to make more informed choices.

In this view, the big change is simply the “now mainstream” adoption of social technology, and as such the mainstream expectation that businesses are likewise participants on the social web, an expectation that is still only partly met in actual practice.

What inspires you and what leaves you feeling a bit glum?

What inspires me is the continued, frenzied growth in applications–across a very wide range is uses–that encourage the sharing of ideas, experiences, and information. In 1995, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, speaking at MIT for the 50th Anniversary of the publication of Dr. Vannevar Bush’s seminal Atlantic article “As We May Think,” remarked that the web should be “a sea of shared knowledge” wherein people could work together on the problems facing the world, and could do so in a context that encouraged “those who followed to accept, adopt or correct” these collaboratively developed solutions. Looking around today at the both the significant challenges and outright problems along with the incredible opportunities and boundless capabilities, the promise of social technology is truly inspiring.

That said, the majority of the social applications are still based on a fundamentally questionable assumption: If one amasses a sufficient audience whose attention can be systematically interrupted, those interruptions can be used to promote or sell goods and services. In other words, in the most cynical view of the social web it’s all about regaining control over the (global) “TV” audience for the purposes of advertising, a business model that is at the heart of the majority of social platforms and technology startups.

If you have a point of view why not leave a comment or question for Dave, or maybe tweet your question to Dave Evans @evansdave.

Here is the presentation that I gave.