Startup Culture Close To Restaurant Day
It's the little things that add up to a regional culture of entrepreneurship. While I'm sure organizations like AaltoES and Tekes would be happy to take the credit for how ubiquitous entrepreneurial hype is in Helsinki, I'm glad there are events like Restaurant Day spread entrepreneurial culture to the streets by helping hundreds pop-up restaurants open four times a year.
Restaurant Day's goal is to spread food culture, but I believe it also serves as the spark that makes people realize there's value in providing the market with something unique. Every self-proclaimed chef has dreams of opening that restaurant or cute coffee shop, and Restaurant Day provides the ecosystem with the same effects as a hackathon. It gets people beyond the idea of starting a restaurant, into the doing.
When A Blog Post Won't Do Justice
Even though this blog post will most likely be a feeble attempt in covering the importance and the effect of Steve Blank's visit to Finland and the region last week - I'll still have an attempt at it. Last week was packed full of action and discussion where Steve Blank talked not only with entrepreneurs but politicians, MPs and academia. He also upped entrepreneurship a few notches on the editorial importance for some of Finland's newspapers as he talked to a group of editors-in-chief (including us) why entrepreneurship is of vital importance to nations' success.
Steve Blank was visiting Finland last week to promote the importance of a working entrepreneurial ecosystem to the region. I have a feeling his visit will go down in one of those turning points in history for this part of the world. Not only did he incite more flames into the "Finnish spring" as he referred to the entrepreneurial revolution taking place in Finland, but he did so in a manner that politicians, mainstream media and academics can understand.
Symptoms Of The Norwegian Startup Ecosystem
This guest post is by Tor R. Grønsund. He is the founder of Lingo Social, a lecturer of Entrepreneurship at the University of Oslo, and the writer of the blog Methodologist. Follow him on Twitter at @tor.
As inventors of the object-oriented programming language and the modern GSM technology, you would expect Norway to have the perfect ingredients for a vibrant startup scene. If you, however, search this or any other notable tech blog for news on early-stage Norwegian startups, you would find next to nothing. While Nordic and Baltic startups seems to thrive, why don’t we see any ventures emerging out of Norway, several Nordic and European professionals questioned me. After talking to a handful of entrepreneurs, investors, and scholars about why this is the case, I discovered seven symptoms of the Norwegian start-up ecosystem that might explain why Norway’s tech innovation is lagging behind that of its neighbors.
ArcticStartup's Vigo Questionnaire
Disclaimer: This article is targeted mainly for our Finnish readers. We're working to survey the effects of the Vigo accelerator program on the Finnish startup ecosystem. Other nationalities will surely find it useful once we release the results.
Vigo accelerator program has been a much debated issue here in Finland. Rightly so. It has been promoted with a lot of noise and much to its cause, it is the biggest change in the startup ecosystem for years. Now that it has been up and running for a while, we'd like to know every Finnish reader's opinion on the program and what you think and know of it.
An Outsider's Take On Finnish Startups
We invited Peter Robinett of Bubble Foundry to come and attend Slush on behalf of TheNextWeb blog, an Amsterdam based weblog that reports on everything that influences the future of the Web, in any way. Peter himself is a developer now living in Amsterdam and very active in the local startup scene. Peter for example organizes Lunch 2.0 and Mobile Dev Camp in Amsterdam. Here's Peter's take on the Finnish startup scene.
I had a great time attending Slush on Monday and Ville asked me to share my thoughts of the Helsinki startup scene. While more directed at ArcticStartup's Finnish readers, I hope these comments proven interesting to all ArcticStartup readers. My experience with startups is mainly through working with Dutch ones and organizing various events in the Netherlands, though having grown up in Silicon Valley I hope I have a somewhat accurate sense of how things work there too.
Mike Butcher Of TechCrunch UK Talks About The Euro Startup Scene
I interviewed Mike Butcher of TechCrunch UK on the European startup ecosystem and how he sees it versus the US one while I was visiting Seedcamp in London. I told Mike that we need to make entrepreneurship sexier here in Europe and get more role models for students and young guns to look up to. See what Mike told me and what he thinks of the Scandi startup scene in particular.
We will be discussing the state of the European startup scene here in Helsinki tomorrow night at the ArcticEvening (see more here). Come meet the local startup scene and enjoy a laid-back evening with us.
