If you ever received any invitation to be one of speakers for Turkcell Teknology Summit, think twice! You might have been invited, and then you might accept and cancel all your other plans or anyway, organize yourself for the summit but, wait a minute, they can just cancel your invitation as a speaker!
Since I live in Sweden and do my research at Royal Insititute of Technology and have teaching responsibilities on Innovation and Entrepreneurship related courses, via a channel, someone from Turkcell got in touch with me. They asked me whether I can suggest them some speakers. I suggested some people and they decided to send invitaiton to two of them. Please read email below:
I’m glad to e-meet you. I’m highly impressed by your works.
We would be happy to host you as a speaker in our annual Technology Summit which will take place on 13-14 th of November in Istanbul. The focus will be New Business Development, Innovation & Corporate Venturing.Turkcell Technology summit is Turkey’s biggest technology gathering, and each year we host well known names of business world such as Steve Wozniak, Guy Kawasaki, Kevin Kelly… More than 10.000 technology executives attend this event.
I kindly ask for your confirmation on these dates. Let me know if you have any questions or requests. I would be happy to answer.’
You accept the invitation, and then there are some details needs to be figured, even had a skype call, afterwards, I see there is no any progress or reply from Turkcell side. Then, all of sudden you can an email like this:
I’m sorry that it took long time to get back to you. I had to wait for my colleagues to decide the final list of speakers. I regret to inform you that this year’s big stage will not be focusing on entrepreneurship&innovation. Therefore, our keynote speaker will be from a different field. We have small rooms for panels to discuss about corporate entrepreneurship. But for this scale, we decided to invite local speakers.I hope to keep our contact for further collaborations.
Dear Turkcell people! You should have organized your so called summit before you send invitation to speakers! I suggested you few people and you had right not to invite any of them. You had info about all these people, how successful they are, how global people they are and among them you selected two and send invitation!
Remember, these people are not your toys that you can play with them and ask them to come and then cancel it anytime you want!
Referans: http://www.turkcell.com.tr/tr/turkcell-teknoloji-zirvesi