Oxbridge ‘killers’ asked to do headstands!

Budding entrepreneurs are being urged to turn conventional wisdom on its head at a Cambridge UK conference designed to stimulate a more disruptive approach to technology innovation and social enterprise.

TEDxOxbridge on June 9 is an independently organised TED event and represents a collaboration between University of Cambridge Judge Business School and University of Oxford Saïd Business School. It is being held at the Judge and is being organised by current MBA students at both business schools.

The Judge MBA Program is the primary sponsor for the event, with strong support from Oxford’s Skoll Centre, Cambridge University’s Centre for Risk Studies.

Shai Vyakarnam, director of the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning at the Judge, believes that more ‘outside the box’ thinking is vital to entrepreneurship; CfEL is supporting TEDxOxbridge as an event partner.

Business Weekly has agreed to be a media partner to spread the word about the ‘Unconventional Wisdom’ challenge – the implications of which, for entrepreneurship, spread way beyond the event itself.

Certainly the speakers already lined up for the event have brought new perspectives to social enterprise and technology innovation. They include John Bird, founder of the Big Issue; Geeta Dharmarajan, an inspired educator and founder of Katha and Lord Dennis Stevenson, serial entrepreneur and VC who constantly advises entrepreneurs to challenge assumptions.

Other confirmed speakers in a 20-strong international line-up include Alastair Humphreys, one of National Geographic’s Adventurers of the Year; Andrew Hanson, a campaigner against human trafficking; online educator Shai Reshef; Tanya Goldhaber, who studies our relationship with technology; and Rahul Panicker, co-founder of Embrace Global, which has developed low-cost infant warmers that dramatically increase survival rates of vulnerable babies in developing nations.

The organisers still have some sponsorship opportunities available for what the respective business schools believe will be a thought provoking and game changing experience. The inaugural TEDxOxbridge event in Oxford last year was an outstanding success.

The organisers expect around 220 attendees at the Judge but are practising what they preach by spreading the word to another 300 or so through stream-sites in Oxford and London. In all, the objective is to impact and inspire a broader audience of the scale of several thousands through media and videos. Business Weekly’s website alone is attracting over 60,000 unique visitors a month.

• For more details about the event, go to http://www.tedxoxbridge.com/Sponsorship contacts are: Cambridge - Sharath Ragunathan, sr585 [at] cam.ac.uk, Tel: +44 (0) 7553726237. Oxford - Asmeet Sran-Hansra; email: Asmeet.sran [at] sbs.ox.ac.uk. Tel: +44 (0) 7428954865.