SYNAPSE
ICCE are pleased to announce the launch of their SYNAPSE workshop programme. This programme is available to all departments in Goldsmiths and offers the students the opportunity to develop entrepreneurial tools to ‘map their future’. This is not the same as the tools for enterprise ‘start up’ but a means for students to think about their future and the impact they would like to make. SYNAPSE is also aimed at encouraging students to develop an understanding of the value of an entrepreneurial approach to research, work and careers and to seek out and support entrepreneurial potential in staff and students.
Our current SYNAPSE workshop programme includes
Should I stay or should I go? [Fantasy to reality. How to engage people in your vision].
Offering participants tools to map their preferred future, consider how they could generate income, what is their creative offer and to be able to consider some steps towards the impact they want to make
Evidencing your future
Offering participants the tools to articulate the features and benefits of their work, and to express the effect that they want to have, on who, and to develop the steps that will lead them there.
What’s it worth? Depends who’s asking.
Offering participants the tools to help them find the people that are most likely to support their work, how to better influence people to work with them and to understand how to find out the worth of their work.
SYNAPSE is free to all departments at Goldsmiths. Please contact your Head of Department to arrange a session
ICCE - SYNAPSE also aims to provide:
- opportunities for members of the Goldsmiths’ community to gain a new understanding of entrepreneurship;
- opportunities for individuals to discover whether they have an entrepreneurial aptitude;
- strong and creative approaches to moving staff or students’ ideas into a feasibility plan together with an operational plan to animate the idea;
- understanding and acknowledgement that Goldsmiths is a place which nurtures and supports the generation of ideas which could create value (societal, economic or aesthetic or all of three) and that recognises how moving the ideas through a creative process can determine their likely impact and scale.
To achieve this we will:
- Begin a survey of staff and students in Spring term 2010, to uncover attitudes to entrepreneurial activities and find out whether there is any existing work that could be supported, strengthened or amplified;
- Provide up to 30 staff and 30 students with an opportunity to attend a 1 or 2 day workshop on “rapid prototyping ideas”, giving an insight into how to assess the potential impact that an idea might have and its likelihood of success, assessing the risks that may have to be taken and the responsibilities that the ideas might bring.
- Provide a programme for staff and students, “But I never have time”, which will invite staff to submit ideas that they have had but not had an opportunity to develop, and provide students with training and support to coach/advise the staff, leading to the creation of feasibility study for the staff ideas, and giving students skills and experience in supporting someone else’s idea through the initial stages of development.
- Programme a series of “Round Table Discussions” and “Salons” inviting emerging cultural and creative entrepreneurs to speak, as well as more mature businesses, and provide members of Goldsmiths’ community with opportunities to hear current thinking and approaches to entrepreneurship as well as structures to discuss creative and cultural entrepreneurship.
- Offer new perspectives on careers and staff development that mirrors the need for flexibility, risk taking and ability to spot and maximise opportunities.
[The word "synapse" comes from Greek: "syn" meaning "together" and "haptein" meaning "to clasp.". "You are your synapses. They are who you are."Joseph LeDoux, 2002 (in Synaptic Self)]