Business As An Ecosystem

This week saw the arrival of Birmingham Tech Week, a long-awaited event for our team! For the past few weeks, we have been perfecting our presentation and gathering all the information that we could about the ways we use technology to fuel the company.

In addition to speaking in our own presentation, I attended a couple of other events that the schedule offered. The first of these was the Building and Nurturing Your Business within an Innovation Ecosystem presentation given by Bruntwood SciTech Birmingham. The main thrust of this presentation was emphasising the need for a business to build itself a support network in its surrounding community. They defined the words ‘innovation’ and ‘ecosystem’ as being specifically important to their point. They took Innovation to mean any product or service that is both viable and desirable and ecosystem referred to the things that helped the business, ie. a support network. One of the two main speakers, Dr David Hardman MBE, a former microbiologist as he described himself, used a brilliant analysis to explain how the use of the word ecosystem is really relevant to businesses. Ecosystems can be defined as a community of interacting organisms along with their environment, and businesses if we look at them as independent microbes can be seen in the same way. They are each trying to survive, but without the community of other microbes, they will fail as they have nothing to depend on.  

Katherine Fuller, the other speaker, spoke of the importance of understanding what is on offer that could aid the growth of the business. Once we understand the help that is on offer, we can then go about utilising it, while making sure that the specifics are right for your business. Once you accept help then building up a network within the business community is easier as you have the right tools for the business to flourish, and with this opportunity, you should aim to be recognised by staff from other businesses. If they don’t know you they can’t help you and that defeats the objective of building up a network. Katherine did stress the point of letting people know the weaknesses of your business, as it is only once they know them that they can help you. 

Overall, we at WeiPoint think that Birmingham Tech Week was a great success and we are very grateful to the organisers for letting us be a part of this event! We hope to return next year.