ICCI Barcamp in Germany, organised by Municipality Gelsenkirchen
On September 27th, a sunny and warm day the ICCI Barcamp in Germany took place. The location was a building at „Halfmannshof“, an old artists settlement.
The participants, on the contrary, were mostly young entrpreneurs. None of them had worked abroad but all of them wished to do so.
The barcamp began with a casual getting to know each other in the sun. By the time all 20 participants arrived, the location changed to indoors and the presentation began.
How confident are you?
The day was structured in 3 parts. The first part covered the presentation of the ICCI programme. The second part was a practical one about the ICCI platform – there was a walkthrough on how to register and how to navigate the platform. The third part was the training with several of the tasks from the ICCI handbook.
While the first part people seemed to be really interested into the idea of ICCI. During the second part most of them directly followed the walkthrough and registered on the platform. As an ending for these two theoretical parts the self-assessment tool about one´s confidence with the topic was filled in by the participants.
Mission what?
After the break, the last part of the day began with an video-greeting from Brune Charvin an participant from the initial training in Matera, Italy. She explained what exercise helped her getting started with concrete plans for her internationalisation. For her, so she said, formulating a Mission Statement made everything else fall into place.
Where am I and what do I want?
This video was not only meant as a teaser, but as well as an structure for the following topics. In order to think of an Mission Statement, two other exercises were made beforehand. First was an exercise about one’s own goal system. This exercise was about prioritising ideally, as well as economic goals. Second was the positioning-exercise. The participants were asked to position themselves in a matrix between high or low customer-orientation and on the other axis between Applied Arts or fine Arts. The aim here was to take a look at one´s work and position from a customer’s or partner´s point of view.
With this new input about aims and positions the last exercise was formulating a Mission Statement. As an inspiration Brune Charvins Mission Statement was projected.
This part turned out to be quite intense and was followed by a lot of talks and discussions from all participants.
What the Barcamp brought forth
After another short break the barcamp entered its actual barcamp-phase. The participants could choose which topic they want to dive into next: Barriers, S.M.A.R.T. Goal Specification, SWOT Analysis or choosing possible countries. Their choice was the S.M.A.R.T. Goal Specification. For this the worksheets from the ICCI Handbook were distributed.
While talking about the outcome, the discussion shifted to the question „at what point does the actual creative work suffer from rearranging one´s capacity to do all the organisational work?“ While exchanging views and ideas on this question two possible summaries of what has to be fulfilled before going abroad were shown in the presentation. And with this input the official part of the Barcamp ended. The feedback was quite positive and the participants showed a lot of interest in taking these new thoughts from the day further.
The evening ended with everyone chatting, eating Pizza. Even then the main topic of conversations was „internationalisation“.
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