At present, I am attending the Seminar-Workshop on Entrepreneurship and ICT for Retired/To Retire UP Employees at the National Computer Center which started last Monday, 25 May 2009 up to Friday, 29 May 2009. For the last 2 days, we have been sitting in lectures given by experts on the various topics included in the course of studies, doing hands-on exercises to strengthen the knowledge provided in the lectures and performing energizers/icebreakers in between the sessions to ease our backs from sitting down too long. So far, everything has been a great and enjoyable learning experience.

The Seminar is divided into Entrepreneurship (1st 2 days) and ICT (last 3 days).
Yesterday, I learned about:

- the 3 Es - Entrepreneur, Environment, Enterprise;
- the ten characteristics of the entrepreneur;
- the six types of enterprises;
- the seven phases of entrepreneurship;
- the four aspects of a business plan;
- the elements of the marketing plan which include the uses and the users of the product,
demand vs supply, marketing strategy, sales forecasting, and estimates of marketing
expenses;
- the elements of the technical plan which include the production schedule, the product
specifications, production capacity, process description, equipment requirements,
facility layout, ocation considerations, materials requirement, workforce needs, utilities
requirement and the estimates of production cost.
- the elements of the organization plan which includes the legal form of the business, the
qualification of the management team, the business implementation schedule, and the
organization cost.
- the elements of the financial plan which include the total business cost, debt-quity require-
ments, financial projections (income statements, balance sheet, and cashflow) and
financial analysis (return on investment [ROI] and payback perior [PBP])

The exercise (2 cases) provided where we were made to compute for sales, expenses, operating income, total business cost, ROI, depreciation, and PBP as well as the examples/anecdotes provided on existing businesses are very much appreciated.