Kea: Communicating with Kiwi Expats & Synergy Collaboration

Mark Thursday 17 November in your diary for this month's networking event at the Auckland Town Hall Ground Floor Council Chamber. Auckland ICT would like to thank Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development Ltd for kindly sponsoring this event.

Collaboration was one of the main themes from the Rutherford Innovation Showcase. We have two speakers to address this from different perspectives. Dr Sue Watson, Global CEO of Kea, will explain how to engage with over 30,000 Kiwi expats. Professor Keith Popplewell from Coventry University will talk about the Synergy Project, which facilitates SME collaboration.

Kea: Communicating with Kiwi Expats

1. An Introduction to Kea, New Zealand's Global Network
2. An overview of members (32,000 Kiwi expats)
3. How Kea plan to engage with their members

Supporting network enterprise collaboration through adaptive knowledge services

The Synergy Project, funded by the European Commission investigated the feasibility of providing support for networks of enterprises, primarily small to medium sized enterprises, who come together to compete as a collaborative virtual organisation for business opportunities, which would be beyond the reach of any of them acting alone. The resulting software service prototypes include management of collaboration knowledge for individual enterprises and virtual organisations, risk management, a collaboration moderator, and collaboration patterns embodying evolving best practice.

Services can be delivered through a native Synergy portal, but in fact exploitation is developing around delivery as a “product in white” where clusters of users can brand a platform and customise services and access to their own requirements. Services can also be assembled in rather different ways to meet very different needs, and validation work included application on the one hand in an existing SME cluster trying to improve its capture of new opportunities, and on the other, a cluster of pharmaceutical research SMEs and universities, who came together to try out the collaboration support for Synergy, and then discovered a number of new drug leads as a result.

Go to www.aucklandict.org.nz for more information and to RSVP.