Seeding Diversity to Promote Innovation

This workshop aims to plan what we need to do over the next 300 days to drive diversity, entrepreneurship and innovation agendas within our centres and generally how the technology and business services sector can engage with the wider community to build capability.

The workshop will be led by key representatives of Google, Google for Entrepreneurs and special guest, Sharon Vosmek, CEO of Astia, the Silicon Valley based global initiative that promotes inclusive innovation.

Key questions we will seek to address are:

How to seed gender diversity?
How to enhance intercultural awareness?
How to encourage creativity and risk-taking?
How to develop synergies between start-ups and multinationals

We will also look in some depth at existing local initiatives to support the above to explore how we can benefit or contribute to these.

Following an introduction and discussion on diversity, it importance and the value of diverse teams, participants will split into 6 facilitated groups to explore the following areas:

Improving representation of women in senior management
Closing the gender gap in IT
Mothers on the job market
Understanding the local start-up community and opportunities to engage
Knowledge sharing between the corporate and start up worlds
Mentoring programmes

The purpose of each group will be to explore potential actions that we can take over the next 300 days to develop the talent pool.

We will then review the recommendations of each group to find the top 12 action points to take forward.

	Time	Duration
1. Value of diverse teams; background facts; forces which mitigate against diversity	14.00	30 min
2. Introduction to themes: a) women in senior management / support for women in business b) the gender gap in IT c) maternity leave / returning mothers on the job market: d) the Kraków start-up community – another success story e) IT projects in the community f) mentoring programmes	14.30	30 min
3. Themed discussions in groups, answering the questions: – what are the key challenges? – what are the potential solutions? – what are the actions we can take on in the next 300 days?	15.00	75 min
4. Sessions summary / Action Planning: – agreeing success criteria – agreeing what can be replicated – agreeing what can be cross-company, aggregated or co-ordinated by ASPIRE – agreeing what resources are needed	16.15	45 min