BUS477

I asked Sam Thiara for the names and bios of the 2009 Ken Spencer Competition judges this week.  It looks like the panel will be made up of the following three (3) esteemed judges:

Alex Pop - Business Development Bank of Canada

Ian Hand - SFU Business

Jim Derbyshire - SFU Venture Connection

I have also asked Sam to confirm if the judges will be using a scorecard to evaluate the submissions.  Hope to have confirmation on that soon.

Bios

Jim Derbyshire

Jim Derbyshire is a Serial Entrepreneur, CEO, Angel Investor, Mentor and Board Member. Jim started as an engineer and moved through engineering management, management consultancy and venture capital to the start up world for the last 18 years. He has been CEO for 16 years at Symbionics (Cambridge, UK) and SiGe Semiconductor (Ottawa, Canada) and has co-founded or been actively involved with over ten start ups. Jim has experienced growing businesses in many business models, part time “student”, low capital “bootstrap”, Angel, Corporate and VC backed, raising over $100M of finance and selling several companies during his career. He has worked in multiple countries for large (ITT), medium (Racal, Decca, PA Consulting) and start up enterprises operating in Systems, Products, Components, Software and IP Licensing and Management and Technical Consulting Fields. Jim has marketed and sold products and services in US, China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.

Jim has a B.Sc. (Hons.) in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Kingston University in the UK, is a Chartered Engineer and a Fellow of the I.E.T., participated in I.E.E.E. 802.11 and E.T.S.I. DECT, CT2 and GSM standards groups and has several granted patents.

Ian Hand

Ian is a serial entrepreneur, educator, consultant, investor, board member and volunteer.  He is the founder and principal of Northwest Strategies Inc., a privately held financial advisory and investment firm, active in the technology, industrial, health care, financial and investment sectors.  

Ian has extensive business planning, development and corporate finance experience, having structured and raised over $750 million in private and public equity and debt financings and managing multiple acquisition, merger and divestiture transactions and liquidity events.

Formerly, Ian cofounded, financed and developed several world class high net worth,  venture and strategic investor-backed technology and communications sector firms, including Digital Interactive Video Access, a silicon valley firm that pioneered the development of digital video on demand platforms for the cable television industry licensed by Motorola, Scientific Atlanta, TIVO, Replay TV and Pace Micro that that are now in use worldwide, as well as Canada's first competitive local exchange and international interexchange telecommunications carriers and Canada’s leading medical information company.

Ian teaches finance and new ventures in the MBA programs at Simon Fraser University's Segal Graduate School of Business and UBC's Sauder School of Business Robert H. lee Graduate School. He has instructed and coached student teams that, inter alia, have won or placed as finalists in  the MootCorp™ International MBA Business Plan Competition, the IBK Capital Ivey MBA Business Plan Competition (Canada's National MBA Business Plan Competition ), New Ventures BC Business Plan Competition, Enterprize Business Plan Competition and the Jungle MBA Life Science Business Plan Competition as well as advising individual students and teams who have launched new business ventures. He is an invited speaker at conferences and events for organizations including New Ventures BC, SuperCom CableWest, SoftWorld, CFA Institute, Comdex, BC Film, New Media BC, NVCA, CMA Canada, CGA, Learning Strategies Group and UBC UILO, among others.

Follow Ian on twitter @ianhand, or email him at ianhand ‘over at’ mac.com.