This means broadening the INSEAD mentors network beyond our current Entrepreneurs in Residence who are present on campus at least one day per term and are providing priceless support to our entrepreneurial students.  

If you would like to become a mentor please email us at entrepreneurship@insead.edu with your contact details, a bio, and a list of industries or types of ventures that you are happy to guide and assist and we will upload these details onto the new Entrepreneurship website currently being developed.

In the meantime, below is an article from one of our current Entrepreneurs in Residence about his experiences in this role over the last three years.

Entrepreneur in Residence - a gift to you!

When I began my job as an Entrepreneur in Residence, many people from INSEAD began to thank me for my willingness to be a mentor for the students planning to start up their own businesses after INSEAD.

But I looked at it in another way. First of all I wanted to give back to INSEAD what I gained from INSEAD during my MBA year in 1977/78. Secondly I hoped to get something back from meeting the entrepreneurial students.

After 3 years I must conclude, that I get much more back than I give. It is fascinating to sit down with people 30 years younger than me - but with partly the same background - the INSEAD MBA.

I understand from many of them, that they are extremely thankful to me for my advice, although I often feel that I am telling them rather obvious things. But sometimes it is important for everybody to have an external view of the situation. During the many months at campus, you are missing the lifeline to the real world outside. I am representing the real world, when I try to give - what I call - obvious advice.

But for me, the most challenging thing is all the ideas and the network I get from the EIR experience. With more than 70 different nationalities, I listen to business ideas from all other the world. And starting and running a business in China is very different from starting and running a new company in the U.S. - in some ways. In other ways it is exactly the same challenges you meet anywhere in the world.

So, when I like - or better love - my EIR job, it is merely because I get so much back from meeting the students.

You should try it!

Peer KOLENDORF (’78J)

Date: 2009-05-22

• Philip Anderson has been named Academic Director of the INSEAD Abu Dhabi Centre.

• Claudia Zeisberger and Bill Magill have started teaching the Private Equity course in Singapore and Fontainebleau respectively.

• Rolfe Swinton (’04J) has started teaching the New Business Ventures course.

• Peer Kølendorf  (’78J) and Raomal Perera will be teaching Business Plan Workshop in Fontainebleau.  The course, on both campuses, has now been split into two halves, the first half covering Business Planning, and the second half covering Effective Fundraising.

• Dominique Trempont (‘79J) from the Silicon Valley just started teaching “From Start-up to Fortune 500” in Singapore.

We have two major course changes in the entrepreneurship MBA electives offering:

• Managing Corporate Turnarounds Successfully:

Claudia Zeisberger will teach this brand new course with research support from Phil Anderson.  The course introduces students to the challenges of managing critical turnaround situations in corporations globally.  To consistently preserve shareholder value throughout the ups and downs of the business cycle, it is vital to understand the requirements of a concise turnaround plan and the steps involved to execute it successfully and in a timely manner.  The course builds on the earlier classes in the MBA programme, is a natural follow on to courses in Entrepreneurship and Private Equity.

• Entrepreneurial Leadership:

Randy Carlock has recently revamped this course to address the challenge faced by every executive – how to maintain entrepreneurial values while organising professionally, thinking strategically, maintaining controls and demanding accountability.  This course is now a series of experiential learning activities based on three assumptions: 1) entrepreneurial leadership is a competitive advantage in 21st Century organisations, 2) there are teachable entrepreneurial leadership behaviours, and 3) people can learn to be more entrepreneurial in their thinking and behaviours.  The course helps build an understanding and appreciation of how entrepreneurial leadership can influence individual performance and improves the organisation’s climate for innovation and value creation.  The new version of the course was first taught in the summer of 2008 and its success now led to its introduction to the EMBAs.

Other news:

• Chris Zott, Professor of Entrepreneurship, is currently on a leave of absence.

• Hennie Escoffier, who has been with INSEAD for over twenty years and with the entrepreneurship area from its inception, has now left INSEAD.   She will be missed by many of us.  We warmly welcome Roisin Kelly to the department as the new Faculty Area Administrative Manager.

Requests from faculty

• Examples:  Professor Henrich Greve is looking for performance feedback vignettes for teaching purposes and possibly also for a popular article.

A performance feedback vignette would be a set of events along the following lines:
Low performance (on a goal the firm cares about) - > some sort of radical change - > outcome; either improvement or disaster.

Any recent and new examples would be much appreciated.  If you have one, please contact Henrich at henrich.greve@insead.edu.

• Corporate entrepreneurship: Are you interested in having a team of INSEAD MBAs analyze a new business initiative for your company? In the Corporate Entrepreneurship course taught by Professor Michelle Rogan, MBAs analyze a new business initiative inside a company during the 8-week course.  Read more here.

• Private equity: Private equity professors Claudia Zeisberger and Bill Magill will be teaching the course again in the March/April period.  They both leveraged the extensive list of INSEAD alumni in this industry to support their respective classes in the previous Fall period and are looking to do the same this Spring.  Opportunities for alumni involvement range from sponsoring a special project that student teams develop to address current industry issues, to speaking engagements in the classroom.  If you are interested in participating please contact Claudia at claudia.zeisberger@insead.edu or Bill at bill.magill@insead.edu.

Papers and conferences

• Professor Randel S. Carlock, Ph.D., Berghmans Lhoist Chaired Professor in Entrepreneurial Leadership and a Director of the Wendel International Centre for Family Enterprise wanted to share with you a recent article he has published on “Cheers to French Entrepreneurs”.  You can find a copy here.

• Professor Bill Magill participated in two events at the Photonics Conference in Bordeaux.  This is a European investment conference sponsored by France’s CEA.  Bill took part in a VC panel on investment in the photonics industry (other participants included R Capital, Sofinnova, and EarlyBird) and made a keynote speech on the “Outlook for IPOs and M&A in the Photonics Industry”.

The conference hosted a mix of European entrepreneurs, agencies and venture investors active in photonics markets: lighting, solar, life sciences, displays, and the like. Investors were advising caution to entrepreneurs, specifically to fundraising expectations, capital needs, cash burn, market outlook, and time to exit. That being said, all were continuing to look for great ideas in this downturn and recognized that many great companies have been founded during the bottom of weak markets. Fortunately, plenty of remarkable Bordeaux wines were served during the gala dinner (at Château Pape Clément) to soften the gloom hanging over the investment forum.

For further details please contact the IABAA president Jean-Marc Liduena at: liduena@everest-executive.com

Speakers included:

• Alexandre Douzet (‘02D), Co-Founder and Executive VP & GM, TheLadders.com
• Chris Evdemon (‘05D), Managing Partner Eastern Bell Venture Capital
• Pierre Hennes, Co-Founder & Partner, Upstream Ventures
• William Klippgen (‘03D), Co-Founder and Executive Director, BAF Spectrum
• Sramana Mitra, Entrepreneur, Strategy Consultant and author of “Entrepreneur Journeys”
• Garett Wiley, Managing Director, 798 Group

  Moderator: Patrick Turner (’78), Affiliate Professor of Entrepreneurship

INSEAD 17th Business Venture Competition Final took place on the Singapore campus with three finalists from each campus participating.  Further details of the competition can be found here. Our congratulations go to: 

• First prize - Emergency RAT: Toby Wicks, Gautam Narasimhan, Olivier Thirion de Briel, Abhishek Bahl 
• Second prize – Wildfire: Christophe Zrenner, Benjamin Duvall, Martijn Jansen, Jeff Huang, Bharat Sandhu 
• Third prize – Single Point:  Rustam Sengupta, Anand Nevgi

We have tied-up with Freie University in Berlin to provide our students with a source of high quality technology projects to be commercialised.  The first six were presented to our students at the start of term in January 2009.  We are exploring similar opportunities with top research centres around the world. Omnis Mundi and Pole Sud77 have both come to campus to pitch technology businesses or projects to our MBAs.  Both events were a great success.

VC trek to Paris: a huge thank you goes to the French Alumni Association, and Jean-Philippe Grosmaitre in particular, who helped organise a trek to Paris for some MBA entrepreneurs wishing to learn more about the VC industry.  Special thanks also go to Nicolas Tcherdakoff (‘97J), Matthieu Baret (‘02D), Julien Bentz (‘04D), and Julien Godard (‘04D) who dedicated their time and effort for this session.

VC course by Hussein Kanji, Accel: Hussein gave a three-hour course on the VC industry for our MBAs.  The event was so successful that we are now looking at making it a regular event for our students.

Going to Market – the Moment of Truth.  This event was part of the Global Entrepreneurship Week on our Singapore Campus and had panellists from four countries brought into the Auditorium using video links and Skype. Panelists included:

• In Singapore, Carlos Fernandes, Founder and CEO of RecordTV
• By visiolink from Boston, Scott Anthony, President of Innosight, an innovation consulting and investing company; co-author with Clayton Christensen and Erik Roth of the best-selling book “Seeing What’s Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change”
• By visiolink from Mumbai, Mahesh Murthy, Founder and CEO of Pinstorm
• By visiolink from Beijing, Olav Nedrelid, Founder and CEO of Ethos
  Moderator: Kuen Loon Ho, Partner and the COO of Innosight Ventures, based in Singapore

Omnis Mundi - a firm focusing on seed level companies and ideas – came to campus to pitch six soft tech projects to our students to pursue as part of their entrepreneurship electives.  Successful students have a chance to join the management teams of these projects.