Finland Gets its Startup School this Summer
Nordic media, take note. Finland is notorious for its lack of entrepreneurs. A collaboration between student-run associations from the top 3 schools in Helsinki (Aaltoes, Hankenes and Hues) has raised 50,000 euros in public funding, to encourage students to create startups during the Summer.
Summer of Startups will take place during July and August and will provide 750 euros per month in funding to each team member, regardless of their school or country of origin. This is the first time such a program does not take any equity, unlike programs such as Y-Combinator, Techstars, or Startup Bootcamp Denmark. The goal is purely educational, in order for students to try entrepreneurship without having to fear from failure. Stanford started a similar initiative called SSE Labs, which will run from June 15th-Sept 15th.
Disclaimer: I am the main coach of this program.
The program will be divided in 8 weeks. Each will have a unique theme, where CEOs from existing startups will serve as mentors and share their experience in the following topics:
- Team building: collaborating, finding ideas
- Market: exploring and finding the right customer segments
- Business model: iterating ways to get revenue
- Networking: finding the right events, media and prospects
- Pitching: creating a compelling sales and investor pitch
- Field trip: travel to Tallin or Berlin to meet local startups
- Failure: how to learn from failure and to iterate
- Last push: where to go from there
A total of 60 applications were received. From those, 20 were selected to participate in a pitching competition in front of a panel of judges: Kristo Ovaska (founder of Aaltoes), Will Cardwell (ex CEO of Technopolis), Sami Heikkiniemi (Tekes), and me (CEO of Mysites). The ten winners selected were:
- MDA - a mobile service to scan and collect info of your diet in real-time
- Incspark - “Friendfeed for the enterprise”
- SMS IT – enable updates to Facebook and other social media services by SMS (for example when abroad)
- Living Canvas – creates “Rainforest in a box” for office spaces.
- Alfa – Location-based reminders (ex: “buy toothpaste” when in supermarket)
- Octarine – makes it easy to create travel logs online with your pictures and videos
- Mookoo – creates more comfortable and ecological design textile materials for furniture
- Buffee – a platform for social games to collect feedback from users regardless of their mother tongue
- Micro Polling – simple mobile-based surveys to provide better feedback to companies
- Pamoja Innovations – promotes development of greentech and renewable energy in East Africa
We hope to see more such initiatives in the Nordics and wish good luck to the new startups.
11 Comments
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Great picthes and great teams , Good luck for everyone
What a great bunch of young and passionate of people!
Btw. Stanford SSE Labs started in June and it ends in September. Why not Skype over to them some day?
Thanks Olli, I've corrected this.
Congrats to organizers and teams! Event is a definite success. For those who missed the event there are some twitts at http://twitter.com/search?q=%23aaltoes
It is a great initiative to help the creative sparks of young to-be entrepreneurs to ignite the fire of mindful progress! :) Such support is especially important for Finland.
Good luck for teams!
Hyvää Juhannusta kaikille!
Personally I find Living Canvas and Octarina the most interesting. If you are a part of those teams want to hear my (probably lousy) ideas, feel free to contact me :)
Good luck for the teams and for the program! This kind of support is much needed. Thumbs up!
This is just great! Aalto is creating waves that move.
Amazing start-ups I must say after seeing all the pitches! Looking forward to start the program.
Also, really confident that Finland will be the next start-up nation :)
Good stuff, Ramine!
As they say in the movie: "This could be the beginning of a beautiful start-up decade."
Good luck to all winners and others too!
This is a very interesting initiative!
Related, startups and entrepreneurs seeking funding for their business may also want to join http://www.adwebix.com - an online service connecting entrepreneurs with investors.
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It's free and easy to use.
Best regards,
Ashley.
http://www.adwebix.com
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