New network for East of England’s ladies who launch

This one-day event, entitled “Opening Doors to Enterprise”, is taking place at New Hall College, University of Cambridge on Friday 2nd December. All 120 places at the conference have now been taken, and the organisers — Cambridgeshire County Council, the University of Cambridge, and the Cambridge-MIT Institute — have been delighted by the response.

Delegates at the conference will gain invaluable insights into growing a business from idea, to incubation, to exit. Speaking at the conference will be some highly successful female entrepreneurs and business leaders including Candace Johnson, President of Europe OnLine and recently named by CNN and Time as one of the most powerful business women in Europe; and Amber Nystrom, Executive Director of Social Fusion and former founder of the Women's Technology Cluster in San Francisco, which has helped launch over 150 female-led businesses since its foundation in 1998. Delegates will also have the opportunity to get involved with the new Women in Technology Community (WiTC) which was launched in October.

The WiTC is not just a community for women who are looking to set up a hi-tech company or work at a senior level within the region’s technology cluster. It will also provide an excellent new business opportunity for anyone working in the service industries that support the region’s hi-tech cluster – legal, marketing, finance, HR and intellectual property.

If women in the region matched the number of male-led start-ups, there would be an additional 16,000 businesses in the East of England alone. The organisers of the Women in Technology Community believe that this initiative will provide much needed support for female entrepreneurs in the East of England, ultimately boosting the region’s economy by increasing the number of high-tech start-ups and their rates of success.

“The technology cluster which has grown up around Cambridge makes a significant contribution to the economy of the UK," said the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, Professor Alison Richard, speaking at the WiTC launch in October. "But the potential for future growth of the cluster will be greater still if we can tap the entrepreneurial talents of women more effectively. I believe that the Women in Technology Community is going to play a vital role in ensuring great ideas and new businesses come to fruition by supporting women entrepreneurs."

Increasing female entrepreneurship is recognised by the Government’s Strategic Framework for Women’s Enterprise as a key challenge facing the UK economy, and the University of Cambridge’s commitment to this agenda was recently recognised by a grant from the Department for Trade and Industry. The £1.5 million funding will be used by the Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI) to develop its programme of ‘Education for Innovation’, which includes entrepreneurship courses for mid-career women.

CMI has a programme of courses specifically designed to meet the needs of mature female professionals with substantial work experience who are currently working in business, taking a career break, or are considering starting a business of their own.