The Nordics as a united open innovation market: key learnings from the 1st Open Innovation Meetup
The Open Innovation Tour was kickstarted in Helsinki a few weeks back, with the first meetup at Maria01 in Helsinki! The packed event gathered both corporations and startups to share experiences and learnings from startup-corporation collaborations. The idea of these meetups is learn about open innovation from real life examples as well as make the Nordics a single open innovation market for globally established companies. You can read more about the concept of the meetups here. If you are interested to join the rest of the meetups, there is still time. Make sure to sign up for the Stockholm event tomorrow , Copenhagen, October 25th and Tallinn, to be announced!
Next, we will share some of our key insights from the discussions at Maria 01 in Helsinki.
It is not just a hackathon hype
The digital solution company Perfektio calls themselves the hackathon superstars, but they have their reasons. The company have participated in over 20 hackathons, won 10 of which 5 lead to pilot projects. He states the importance of agile companies, both the startups as well as the corporation and the belief in a continuation also after the challenge is over.
Get new products, concepts or even new companies from open innovation challenges. Perttu Lähteenlahti from Perfektio
Fail open and fail fast — experimenting new ideas and new collaborations
According to Samuli Pekkola from Tampere University of Technology, big corporations are usually stuck in their daily routines and it is challenging to look outside the box. The real collaboration case by Airbus and Steerpath showed how you can change the routinized culture within a large corporation.
The challenge is how to get a business owner to buy the idea of a hackathon and in turn buy the idea of the new solution.
Samuli Pekkola, Professor, Tampere University of Technology
Catalin Gheorgiu, the Product Business Manager at Airbus explained the need of change inside the company, and this they did by opening up for the innovation challenge.
After the challenge, the organization changed the way they think about innovation. For a big company this kind a turn is amazing.
Catalin Gheorgiu, the Product Business Manager
After the open innovation challenge, Airbus and Steerpath started collaborating. Tuomas Ilola, the CEO Steerpath was one of the member of their team attending the challenge.
We had no clue about the what the Airbus challenge was about and their problems were completely different than ours. By talking to the organization we experience an eye opening 48h learning process. For us this collaboration has been a great sales opportunity and learning process. Learning to sell to a market segment that they wouldn’t have sold to otherwise.
Tuomas Ilola, CEO, Steerpath
Opening up is easy, implementation is hard: the key is trust
Slush and Finnair discussed about the reasons behind their partnership.
Decision-making and implementing a pilot has its challenges: people need to be focused, know what to do and the pilots can’t be too long. Makes sure to set up KPI:s so you see that you are successful. In addition to getting access to data and information about the everyday business of the corporation, both parties are sharing their view of the world and together coming up with cool solutions. The key is to foster a relationship based on trust.
Katri Harra-Salonen, CDO, Finnair
The Open Innovation Meetups are open for everyone. This is a great opportunity to explore the opportunities with open innovation, learn about how it works from real case examples and last but not least, expand your Nordic network!
Let’s connect and facilitate more collaboration across the Nordic borders!
Rising North is three-year fund of €1,5M, financed by the Nordic Council of Ministers and operated by the Finnish Startup Foundation. The fund aims to help Nordic startups become global leaders by financing unique spearhead projects and initiatives organized jointly by Nordic organizations. All the grants of Rising North for 2016–2018 have been given out. You can check out finalized projects on our website and stay updated on upcoming project by following Rising North on Social Media.
