Managing your own contacts and taking control of your own market

Once you have access to a core of entrepreneur consultants, you have gained political support and your team is on board, you will need to keep replenishing the gene pool. Each institution is able to either share opportunities with the New Opportunities Group or, once it has gained critical mass, create its own closed university specific group. If it is the former, then in order to admit members each participating university will need to agree protocols on the approval and admittance of new members, and the terms of entry and participation in polls. If a university wants to go it alone, has sufficient critical mass, or wants to retain a manageably sized group, then it can have its own rules. There is a technical 'how to' manual available to all members that join the KT 2.0 network.

Assign a champion to manage the community

Finally, the key to making your community hum is to allocate a specific internal community manager to ensure that both the community of practice (communications) side of things, and the New Opportunities Group (the marketplace) side are both animated. The former should gradually generate and rely on user generated content, but will need someone to spend time instigating discussions and aggregating content for occasional mailers. This could be outsourced cheaply or it will take a few hours a week internally. Someone in your team needs to own this role and to engage the others in the process.

This person (or another team member) can also run the polls for the consultant marketplace. It may be that this latter role is best aligned with the IP management and commercialisation roles in your team. The former is more aligned with a marketing role. Though drawing together of IP management, IP sales and marketing might impose a more clear agenda on the purpose of any community animation of marketing. Ultimately it is all directed at increasing the exploitation of intellectual assets.