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Empowering Entrepreneurs to Exploit the Digitization Phenomenon

Piotr Pluta, Director Corporate Affairs - EMEAR

The entrepreneurial spirit enables innovation, growth, and prosperity around the world and helps transform the economic and social landscape. Digital technology-based entrepreneurship can encourage innovative solutions and business opportunities to address challenges, enable personal achievement and business success, and help create jobs to grow and sustain local economies.

e-Learning as a tool for entrepreneurs

Nowadays, the environment of entrepreneurs is evolving increasingly fast in terms of technology, regulations, customer needs, etc. This speed of evolution provides a challenge to traditional teaching, as the natural rhythm of traditional teaching is not aligned with the speed of modern entrepreneurial world. Indeed, the entrepreneurs want to quickly acquire targeted and customized knowledge, which should be immediately useful. Digital content delivery can achieve this objective, in a very pragmatic and realistic way.

In addition to that, modern entrepreneurs want to have flexibility in their learning process, so they can easily combine it with their professional project. They also need to interact with the content in a way that suits their learning style. That becomes possible thanks to the latest e-learning technologies and the use of networked learning environments.

Digitization as opportunity for entrepreneurs

Digitization brings broad opportunities to entrepreneurs and they should have easy access to knowledge about the digitization phenomenon. There are currently 1.5 devices for every human being on the planet. All over the world, sensors, smart objects, and other devices are connecting through the reach and power of the Internet. And they’re dynamically generating, analyzing, and communicating intelligence. That increases operational efficiency, powers new business models, and improves quality of life. Connecting the unconnected is the Internet of Things (IoT). Education should enable entrepreneurs to know and leverage the digitization opportunities IoT brings.

The exponential increase in connected devices is producing a deluge of valuable data to store, sort, and apply. This explosion of data and data analytics is generating new, more sophisticated ways to redesign processes and create new business opportunities in energy distribution, utilities management, mining, security management, transportation, retail, entertainment, healthcare, agriculture and other entrepreneurship areas.

In this respect, the Cisco Networking Academy®  focuses on digitization knowledge and also provides an entrepreneurship course. That course incorporates a new approach to teaching and learning entrepreneurial skills. It has interactive, online case studies designed to help students learn business skills and apply networking capabilities within the context of starting a business. The students learn how to apply digital technology skills to starting a business or advance their career. The purpose of this course is to:

• Increase self-confidence and personal motivation.
• Improve leadership skills and financial literacy.
• Learn about starting different kinds of businesses from an Internet café to a consulting service and more.
• Connect with the global Cisco Networking Academy community.

The Cisco Networking Academy® is the flagship of Cisco global CSR program. it has many other resources for teachers, students, and life-long learners enabling entrepreneurship, and broad access to knowledge related with digitization. Further information can be found on www.netacad.com

About the Author

Piotr Pluta, Director Corporate Affairs - EMEAR

Piotr has started his career in Cisco ten years ago by joining European leadership team in CEE region, which was just created to accelerate business growth. Since 2012 he has been leading Cisco Corporate Affairs in Europe with broad responsibility for Cisco Corporate Social Responsibility Programs in Europe. Cisco CSR includes pillars like Governance and Ethics, Supply Chain, Social and Environmental corporate impact. Education, Healthcare, Economy Development are key areas of Cisco CSR impact in Europe. Between 2008 and 2012 he has been leading Public Sector Practice in Central Europe, Emerging Markets EMEA and Global Public Sector team as Local Government Manager. Within those years Public Sector department have reached new level of cooperation with Central Government organizations and Government Enterprises. Government Informatization, E-Society Development, Transformation of Healthcare and Education are main areas of Piotr’s competence and experience. He has lead Cisco’s Sales Organisation and close cooperation with governments of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia ( Prime Ministers of Estonia and Lithuania have visited Cisco in San Jose to discuss transformation of their countries ) during his assignment as Cisco General Manager in Baltic States region in 2005-2008. In his early years in Cisco, as member of CEE Management Team he has contributed to building of leadership team and designing and implementing organization investment model.

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