YCF booth at CRCA conference 2013
You realise just how resilient you’re not anymore. It’s been over a week since I got back from Melbourne and the launch of YCF, and since I blogged – I would love to say it’s because I’ve been so busy, but there was a fair bit of too tired too. It was an exciting, challenging, stimulating couple of days that reinforced a few things for me:
- there are major opportunities for anyone prepared to take responsibility for themselves and their development. It was a little disconcerting how many times we heard, in sessions and out, someone ask, “But whose responsibility is that?”. Odds are, if you have to ask, you want it to be someone other than you. The upside of that is that if you will embrace that, you’ll set yourself ahead of the pack.
- there are some amazing innovators doing amazing things in our own backyard, but innovative ideas are only part of the equation. We need to improve what happens to those ideas – the uptake, the conversion into action whether that’s for profit or some other benefit.
- commercialisation is one form of uptake, not the only uptake. And saying you know that means nothing if everything you do is about pursuing and valuing commercial sales.
Okay, so maybe I’m still a bit tired, but maybe you actually really know you’re getting old when you realise these are the same battles you were calling “challenges” fifteen years ago….