The ISBE 2010 Experience: An International Perspective
Juha Tall
The Doctoral Day
My ISBE 2010 experience started by waking up at home in Seinajoki, Finland. Car, two flights, Heathrow Express, two tubes and there I was standing in front of the Shell Building where the Doctoral Day was held.
The purpose of Doctoral Day was to provide a forum for doctoral students to present their ideas and to discuss research issues and challenges. We were divided into seven groups. In our group I was the only doctoral student doing a thesis outside the UK. For me it was another challenge to be involved in group assigment, which was mostly about the UK way of doing thesis. During the day it become very obvious that doing a thesis has similar challenges in different countries! Research design, data collection and data analysis are common tasks to all of us! The research set up of one member in our group was very similar to mine including the number of organisations and supervisors and research design.
Myself and many of the others found the ISBE 2010 Doctoral Day very rewarding. I would guess that this kind of program is the most rewarding for students at an early stage of their doctoral studies, but others can benefit too (I´m in my second year). Presenters John Kitching and Julia Rouse did an excellent job.
Conference
London seems to be very well prepared for events like the ISBE conference. There are many hotels to choose from, a huge amount of transportation and airport flights coming in and out all the time. With over 400 delegates and over 250 presentations ISBE 2010 was a big event!
The organisers did a good job with the opening session. My only suggestion would be that as there are a substantial number of international as well as UK delegates the opening session could have included some international flavoring such as an international key note speaker. Well, anyway for me the conference got into full swing in just two seconds when the networking break started. People meeting people!
According to my ISBE 2010 experience track chairs in parallel sessions form one key element in successful conference. The richness of parallel sessions was one of the many big positive suprises.
My own presentation was an exiting and rewarding experience. I had hoped for a few more audience members but the level of knowledge and experience was excellent. The discussion gave many new approaches to study.
Many breakout sessions can be a bit of confusing but I did have a feeling of being in right place in every session! Ten to twelve break out sessions in six parallel sessions guarantees you can choose according to your own interests.
The ISBE Conference is a big event and provides many opportunities to meet people you know and people you don´t know. You can share your ideas with others who have similar and different research interests. You may explore new approaches to old issues and old approaches to new issues. My ISBE 2010 Conference experience was rewarding. ISBE Conference is fine event to find out what is going on in entrepreneurship research and who are creating its future.
Juha Tall, Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences, Finland
