GoodGoing! and Reseau Entreprendre: how to networking for success

Networking is a boost for growing

The Start-up phenomenon

The word Start-up is extremely popular nowadays and it’s all we seen to hear people talking about. It’s as if this is the panacea of the economy in Italy and Europe.

I’ve been in favour of entrepreneurship for years and have been focusing on the labour market and employment for about a dozen years after a career in which I worked for various companies …

I believe the “next step” for a successful manager is an entrepreneurial venture. If a person is really talented they will end up having their own company. That’s what I was taught at Arthur Andersen, where people would start by programming using Cobol, but we were trained from the outset to become Partners.

Moreover businesses are the main source of job creation in the market economy. So entrepreneurs have a social role of creating work. 

Some people say that being an entrepreneur is in the genes while others believe that it’s something you can become.

I believe that there are different types of entrepreneurship. There can be consultants that combine different type of professional skill to set up a consulting firm (e.g. PerSEOweb), there could be a couple of engineers who have an intuition that evolves from their prior experiences for the creation of a product that they are not able to develop alone and so they need to mobilise other skills and other financial resources (e.g. Biotechware).

Let me give you a couple of examples.

The Association

A few years ago I found about an association that was created in France which is called Reseau Entreprendre. This association brings together senior entrepreneurs that help new entrepreneurs through a method that has been tested over 30 years mainly in French-speaking countries, which includes coaching and mentoring. This association has been in Turin since 2010 and in Milan since 2015. I am one of the founding partners in Milan.

The activities for shadowing new entrepreneurs including mentoring which takes place on (at least) monthly basis by a senior entrepreneur who focus on the start-up, as well as the activities of the so-called Entrepreneurs’ Club, in which the start-ups meet at least once a month to reflect on subject matters that are of interest for the life and development of the start-up.

Professional networking

I have been promoting the issue of professional networking for two years. In particular on 29 February we organised one of these popular events.

Networking??? People talk about it a great deal, but there’s so much improvisation, and superficiality and often nothing tangible comes from all of this… The purpose of the event was therefore that of searching for the key aspects that work!

Attached are the slides that were used for the evening on 29 February.

A similar venture had been presented in 2015 in Turin for Reseau Entreprendre new entrepreneurs in Piedmont.

Entrepreneurship and Professional networking (in Italian) (2214 kb.)