What am I doing in Serbia?

I am in Belgrade, Serbia for one month to do pro bono consulting for a hybrid LLC/NGO called Impact Hub Belgrade.  This program is under the IBM Corporate Service Corps which was started in 2008 in order to help organizations in emerging markets solve problems that intersect business, technology and society while providing IBM employees unique leadership development opportunities.   To date, around 3,000 IBMers have been sent to 37 countries where over 1,000 projects have been completed providing around $70 million worth of value.

Impact Hub Belgrade (http://belgrade.impacthub.net/?lang=en) offers an ecosystem of resources for entrepreneurship development from incubation to acceleration to scaling. They are an innovation lab, business incubator, and community center rolled into one.  My teammates, Regina Corry, Partha Paul, Avinash Gopalsamy and I are working on a project to create a framework for Impact Hub’s Venture Growth Map that tailors entrepreneurial and leadership skills for seed entrepreneurs and develops the scaling potential or expansion in international markets for more established enterprises.  Our team is following the agile approach and using tools such as Mural, IBM Blueworks Live, and Shelf.

Impact Hub has such a cool office I enjoy going there everyday!  Dress code is casual, people are free to sit anywhere (there are colorful chairs, bean bags, even hammock to choose from), and music plays constantly in the background.

Our team works closely with the Impact Hub Belgrade founders Nenad Moslavac and Gaia Montelatici, and their COO Pavle Krivokuća.  They have made us feel so welcome and so at home.  Their passion for what they do is simply amazing!  I also have a lot of respect and admiration for the way they approach their work.  In qualifying entrepreneurs to mentor, they look at not just the potential for profit but the value the business can bring to the community.  Their goal is to develop value-driven entrepreneurs and they measure their success with the success of the entrepreneurs they mentor.  As they’ve said quite a number of times, we are successful if the entrepreneur has reached the success level they have set for themselves.

Photo courtesy of Avinash

#ibmcsc serbia

Meet the IBM CSC Serbia2 Team

The IBM CSC Serbia2 kickoff was held on Monday, May 9th at the historical Hotel Moskva in Belgrade.  Representatives from the client organizations namely Impact Hub Belgrade, Naled, and Nova Iskra, as well as representatives from IBM Serbia, and IBM’s implementing partner Pyxera were in attendance for a simple fellowship.

IBM CSC Serbia2 Team
From L-R:  Mahesh Ganesan, Andy Meyer, Adarsh Subramanya, Sandy Campbell, Connie Sanin, Regina Corry, Jie Chen, Adriana Lippi, Aneeta Razdan, Ed Fortajada. Partha Paul, and Avinash Gopalsamy

 

I am assigned to Impact Hub Belgrade together with Regina Corry from the US, Partha Paul and Avinash Gopalsamy from India.

With Impact Hub Belgrade
From L-R:  Pavle Krivokuca, Connie Sanin, Regina Corry, Avinash Gopalsamy, Partha Paul, and Gaia Montelatici

More on Impact Hub Belgrade in my next blog.

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Serbia Deployment

In mid-January this year, I got an email saying I am finally going to be deployed in May after being admitted to the IBM Corporate Service Corps (CSC) in 2013.  My heart skipped a beat especially when I read that my assigned country is Serbia!  I was absolutely thrilled by this news!  Not only am I going to finally be deployed, but IBM gave me my first choice.  In the application form, I had indicated Africa as my first choice, Europe as my second choice, and South America as my third.  I immediately turned to Google and very soon realized that Serbia is not in Africa.  Serbia is in Eastern Europe and was once part of Yugoslavia!  I guess I don’t have to tell you that apart from essay-writing, geography is not one of my strongest points!

We started our prep work about two weeks after the deployment notice was sent.  The entire CSC program is six months long:  three months of prep work, one month of onsite work, and two months of post deployment work.  Every Wednesday evening, I join eleven other IBMers from five different countries who are part of the Serbia2 Team like me to go over various materials.  There were reading assignments, virtual subteam homework, presentations, etc.  Serbia2 means that we are the second team to be deployed to Serbia.  An alumna of Serbia1 served as the facilitator of the weekly calls, and two other alumni served as mentors.

And just like that, it was May and time to fly!

#ibmcsc serbia