Truman Presidential Museum & Library

Saturday 26th January: We headed for the Truman Library (museum) on Saturday. I was expecting to have a semi-bland time but was very impressed by the multimedia presentations throughout the library. I’m no historian, so I was only really familiar with the fact that President Truman was the head-honcho when things weren’t going so well with Japan, and that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were ultimately his decision during the catastrophic times that were August 1945. One thing I think we unanimously agreed upon was that there was huge amount of spin put on alot of the content in the library, obviously, and why not I suppose. I’m sure if we went to a similar museum in Japan it’d be the same. Regardless of this, Truman appears to have been a truly great man. An intro to Harry S. Truman, as written in the Library:

“When Franklin Roosevelt died of a sudden, massive stroke on April 12, 1945, a relatively unknown and untested man (from Missouri) named Harry truman became president of the United States. Few knew what to expect of the man who now occupied the most powerful office in the world. During Truman’s first days in office he faced some of the most difficult decision encountered by any president in our history”

His first press conference after being sworn in on April 13 1945:
“Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don’t know whether you fellows ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me”

New Venture Bootcamp – Ted Zoller

Day 5, Friday 25th Jan: We spent all of Friday with Ted Zoller. Ted is Executive Director of the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Professor Zoller has taught entrepreneurship courses at UNC since 1999. He is the founding instructor of “Launching the Venture,” which has increased the number of companies to spin-off from UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former associate dean, high-tech entrepreneur and American Management Systems, Inc. principal. He was founding director of economic development at the College of William & Mary, where he developed Jefferson Park, an advanced technology research park. During his two seminars with us he concentrated on the formation of new companies, and in particular the fundamentals of dreaming up, designing and developing business models for new ventures.

Ted’s seminars covered the following topics:
- Born global – can you potentially be a globally oriented entrepreneur from the very beginning – how do you accomplish that?
- Entrepreneurship in the economy – initiative, function and role, catalysts that bring it all together.
- Opportunity recognition – not just the innovation that’ll bring the opportunity to market, its how the market sees that innovation, how do you realise the potential of the innovation?
- Seeking the value proposition – what does it mean to translate your innovation into a discrete value proposition.
- Business model development – applying ideas of global entrepreneurship to the extraction of a business model – how do you design a business model to be truly globally aware & take full opportunity of the information intense knowledge network that we can exploit

We spent a substantial amount of time analysing the composition of a concise value proposition and worked through some examples from Global Scholars’ projects. This practical exercise prooved invaluable to me. I have spent large amounts of time perfecting elevator pitches for various projects but actually manifesting a proposition in a comprehensive written sentence prooved more difficult that I anticipated. I assume this is something that any entrepreneur struggles with, especially when you’re so close to a project! Ted, generously, invited us to revise our propositions and work with him over email to perfect them. He also encouraged us to complete a narrative business model and complimentary diagrams for analysis/criticism upon his return at his second set of seminars on February 8th.