24 Hour Business Camp (24hbc) was wrapped up today at noon. 49 new services and apps (and counting) saw daylight in the last 12 hours and these services are not just some quirky apps, but full blown services. You can find all the projects here.
After all the talk I’ve heard during the past year about innovation clusters and what not, which are without exception driven from top down by pouring money into what are effectively projects that are born dead, 24hbc was the first occasion in which I saw innovation truly actually happening. It’s all about passion and caring, and it matters. In a same way as a person can care for her startup, events and even long term projects should have the same burning desire of a single person or a group of people to create something that matters to them and to their peer group. Anything else fails before it has really started.
All the events I’ve been to, 24hbc was the best I’ve seen along with Reboot that takes place in Copenhagen, Denmark (Reboot beign very different type of event and a lot less productive, but the culture was the same nonetheless). It all came down to the atmosphere. People enjoying their peers company and pushing each other to excel after seeing all the effort that Ted Valentin saw to pull all of us all together. Even the corporate sponsor Bonnier R&D had the right people there who not only blended in, but made the event only better. As they wrote in the Live Blog that were set up for the participants, Beata Wickbom and us to contribute to:
“As sponsors, Bonnier R&D´s main focus was to meet all the entrepreneurs and learn as much from them as we could. Unsurprisingly, we soon realised that the temptation to build something ourselves proved to be to difficult to handle.”
They came up with an innovation that reflects the high level of services that all the participants worked on, and most even finished within a mere 24 hours. Here’s Bonnier’s two cents:
“Morris and I played with the new Mirr:or RFID-reader from Violet. It suddenly dawned on us that
the new SL bus/underground-card has an RFID chip inside, and therefore most people in Stockholm will have one soon. A world of opportunities open.
With a lot of help from Herman (and Pelle), we made a small script that connected the Mirr:or to the Mobilstart API. When the chip is read, a text message is sent to a predefined phone number, notifying what time the reading occurred.
We think this could become a smart little application for families. When the kids come home they simply place their SL card over the reader, and automatically the parents get a text message saying ‘Hi! Sara came home at 14:15’. “
Bonnier was just a drop in the ocean; The young guns developed equally or more promising services, of which I will surely write about later on once they get off the ground. See all of them here and here. Powerfull stuff!
Miikka and I enjoyed our stay. Thank you Ted! Previous post on 24hbc here and here.
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Ville, sounds like a great event, and there definitely need to be more like it.
I want to comment on your statement:
“After all the talk I’ve heard during the past year about innovation clusters and what not, which are without exception driven from top down by pouring money into what are effectively projects that are born dead, 24fhbc was the first occasion in which I saw innovation truly actually happening.”
I basically agree with you regarding the space you primarily cover here, Web 2.0 extended into some other related areas of the internet. I do not think a top-down process can work, though I do think that we are not investing enough in that sector in Finland. We have some emerging winners, many of which you cover, and many of which are not getting enough support.
However, your implication in that statement is a LOT broader. Many, I guess most, other tech areas are not characterized by openness and massive collaboration, low barriers to entry, relatively low investment requirements (outside of marketing). Many take huge investments physical investments in labs and equipment — life sciences and health care, energy, nano, etc.
Without going into a lot of detail, I think that a top-down backing for some of these areas have the potential to yield huge benefits for all stakeholders. To name a very few, take a look at companies like Picodeon, Canatu, Medeia Therapeutics, Imbera, Footbalance, Plexpress, Eniram, Enfucell, Epicrystals, The Switch (all having raised significant private capital in the last year, by the way, and I guess a few will be raising a lot more this year). While again I will not claim to be an expert on any of the fields, I know the companies and am pretty sure that none would have ever gotten off the ground without the strategic focus of building up an industrial cluster — I believe all have gotten significant public grants and loans, though I have not fact checked in all cases. And I am really sure that none of them are born dead.
I am not sure your point on the passion either — talk to these CEOs and I promise you will see a lot of passion and caring, every single one. The fact that they are part of cluster programs have nothing to with it.
I think maybe the challenge with why it is hard to get funding into the social networks/ consumer internet is precisely that you saw innovation happening — if you see it happening, then it unfortunately may not be fundable — look how long it took to get open source innovations like Linux and MySQL monetised. Everybody knew that it was “innovative” (though the term innovation implies also economic monitization and is thus mis-used most of the time), but nobody could figure out what the business model would be — or at least if they figured it out back in the early 90’s they new it would take a long time. While the open source innovation crept into a bunch of other areas and made them more efficient (service and process innovation), guaranteeing QOS (and generating a decent IPR pool) turned out to be the key to raising VC and IPOing companies that were in the business of directly marketing and selling open source products.
What interests me is why social networks and the kinds of industry “clusters” above do not interact a lot more. There can be a lot of cross-benefits. But lets not get into that now.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not arguing that all industrial clusters work, or that they are all efficient (anywhere in the world, Finland included). However, I think that Finland like some other countries is on the tee for great things in the future (especially given the current market conditions!) largely because some well-chosen strategic clusters were selected and implemented thru industrial policy. They definitely missed some promising areas, but they got, and are getting, a lot right.
Arctic Startup is the best blog in Finland without a doubt, keep up the good work!
@Will, thanks for your kind words, we try at our best to keep up :)
I somewhat agree with you. Constantly I find myself with a cognitive bias which makes me think startups and innovations only as a brilliant guy with a laptop, and forgetting all the other industries that actually need something more.
Problems however usually arise when someone actually finds true innovations. By this I mean genuine, status quo changing innovations, which I regard as most valuable to the society. Yet usually these innovations are most overlooked and undervalued by society and institutional investors.
Sometimes I think that innovations and institutions just doesn’t make sense. Humans, and especially institutions are prone to dogmas and rules. When one comes by a truly changing idea, they don’t know what to think about it or it doesn’t fit in their framework. As you mentioned Linux/MySQL might be a great example of this. Most people involved in these projects knew why they were involved and so enthusiastic about it, but general population or business people just didn’t get it. They were only seeing what was missing(eg. business plan, money) and not seeing the everything else.
Regarding about why different clusters don’t mix is, at least in Finland, probably result of mass production of students with rigid degree structures and boundaries(which works just great at getting job from Nokia). As myself, I’m interested in many fields, and yet still I’m presented and forced choosing only from couple of options.
What I often find the most sorrowful is when I look among my peers, my agegroup in their early twenties, is that they don’t even want to change anything. In my belive, generation is lost if it doesn’t desire for change, and usually attitude of change is also a attitude of innovations. This is clearly a larger problem than just who finances what.
@Will,
Thanks for the lengthy and thoughtfull answer. Good thinking there.
I agree with you on many of the points I raised. As a disclaimer, I do admit that I am not a subject matter expert in life sciences and health care, energy, or nana technologies. Thus, my comments and opinions should be taken largely within the remit that ArcticStartup covers, if not specifically mentioned otherwise.
I agree that clusters can be effective on industry and on country levels in many areas. Not trying to argue against the theory of comparative advantage or Mike Porter’s work. Nor am I in no way claiming that people working on life sciences etc. don’t have the same passion in their work and people might have in a project that’s not supported by a top down cluster building. Am sure they are as or more passionate since the time span to completion on such projects is so lenthy.
Here, I am talking about a field that is familiar to me, namely the consumer web and media, mobile and otherwise.
What I am suggesting by the blog post and is that we ought to:
1) support experimentation.
2) tolerate failure from those who have the burning desire to experiment
4) Make sure that the bad projects die and the energetic people get the right signal to move on to experiment with something new
3) do more and plan less
like Morten Lund said, “Remember, we don’t have a clue” what works and what doesn’t in tomorrow’s world. Only way to find out is to experiment, fail fast and keep experimenting. And since failing can be rather rought at times, it makes the world of difference to be able to sosialize with people who have the same frame of mind and see them fail with you or succeed giving you the energy and hope to keep at experimenting. This is why I saw 24hbc so fruitful. It is not a perfect formula, but it’s something new that I, for one, greatly enjoyed.
Where we in Finland go pear-shaped is when we try to control and plan the so called innovation instead of just ensuring that individuals and companies have a working platform that no one party dominates. For top-down to work you need to have a plan -only way to choose the projects you believe will succeed is to create a criteria that needs to filled. In the field we are talking about this mainly means business plans. And if the money is given to certain business plans that fill a certain criteria and kept from others that don’t fill this criteria, it is quite obvious that smart people will change their business plans accordingly.
Then when you have a system with checks and balances that makes sure you keep at that plan (as much as a system can control that). What follows is that all businesses start to reflect the same criteria. This effectively ensures that we will not see anything radically new. At the same time you have people allocating other people’s money (in this case tax payers money) and again quite naturally people have to rely on a certain criteria when they are allocating those funds if it’s not their own money or if they are not explicitly(!) responsible to make a return for that money (vrt. VC funds). At 24hbc there were no criteria that the ideas had to abide by (you just had to get it done in the given time frame) and the possible people considering investing in these ideas were effectively considering doing this with money that they were explicitly responsible of (Even though nobody was really looking at investing in the projects at 24hbc, Bonnier pointed out that their main focus was to “meet all the entrepreneurs and learn as much from them as we could.” This is the first step in the process of creating a healthy ecosystem, even if a really small one. You want to get the direction right, or an ill directed path dependency will follow.
That said, clusters certainly have their place and the platform should be differently regulated and build for each sector (and for a given sector it means investing government funds to build an industry cluster where market can’t do it alone due to the sheer size of the investments needed) so they have the best environment possible to experiment, whatever that might mean in the given field.
I also emphatize with Karri’s take on the challenges our educational system faces, but that calls for another discussion.
If you want a more lenghthy rant on the Finnish system you can find my thinking here http://kitti.jaiku.com/presence/50005795#c-1867829
Ville and Karri, thanks for those comments, we are all on the same page. Ville, I have always thought chaos theory applies more to innovation than it is given credit for, a pretty good post is here: http://kartzpot.blogspot.com/2008/03/innovation-culture-and-chaos-theory.html. This is by definition impossible to plan, and your system of 4 principles is exactly the recipe for solving the problem. Implementation seems to be hell though ;)
Karri, with 2 kids going into university in next couple years, also agree with your comments. A really interesting effect to me is to compare back when I was graduating from high school in the US. My senior year I was totally paranoid about “where I was going to study (which college/university”, did not care “what I am going to study”. Here is seems to be all about “what you are going to study”, which is based on absolutely nothing other than gut feelings and high school experiences. I think this is where the Aalto concept has some real promise.
But what anyway still gives me hope is that the innovation at Suntrica (wwww.suntrica.com) was, from legend at least, based on an idea that a couple university students had while drinking beer in Vaasa. This both satisfies the “butterfly in Australia causing a tornado in Caribbean” chaos theory precept, and backs up another of my favorite theories: university students should drink more beer (at least I survived on that principle for 4 years back in the 80s ;).
Will, I agree with you and am equally troubled how to tackle the challenges, namely:
“What interests me is why social networks and the kinds of industry “clusters” above do not interact a lot more. There can be a lot of cross-benefits.”
and
“This is by definition impossible to plan, and your system of 4 principles is exactly the recipe for solving the problem. Implementation seems to be hell though ;)”
Just as you said, Aalto University holds a lot of promise to tackle part of the cross-pollination dilemma. The previous done right with a skillful design of Unconference(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconference)/24hbc model might take us some way forward. That said, the culture of chaos and resulting ‘innovation’ is of the most delicate of types, and can go wrong if subjected to hierarchal planning procedures and institutional structures. Responsibility of implementing such a system should be given to a person or a very small group that has an absolute independence answering straight to the highest government body exercising people will and they should have experience from successful Skunkwork projects.
Will, thanks for link, I have been always a fan of chaos theory and recently after reading ‘the Black Swan’ also a fan of unpredictable randomness. I think innovations as a very fragile beings that only come to existense if lots of things align right.
I should probable be going out more to drink beer in Vaasa too :)
Aalto University is a step to right direction but it’s not that new or unsual idea. Somehow it’s still hyped as one.
You shouldn’t need millions just to broke little bit of department lines and make different kind of people study and work in the same environment. It’s like a… a ordinary business.
I’m still a little bit sceptical how they will manage to get the new university work in practice. Whole academics and especially different departments could make some changes to get rid of their self assuring and protecting beliefs.