My experience with the Entrepreneurial Challenge in the Catalyst Programme

When I started the Catalyst Programme at The Shortcut I wasn’t sure what to expect. After my first week, it already felt like I belong there. I didn’t know much about the startup ecosystem here in Finland and with my background in science, everything that I heard through our sessions, was pretty much new to me.

In the beginning, it was a little overwhelming and even intimidating. After a few days, listening to inspiring people and their stories, I knew that I am in the right place. I started to let go of my fears and opened up to new challenges. By the end of the second week, we had the Entrepreneurial Challenge. It was designed to test our entrepreneurial skills. This challenge seemed a little scary to me, even though I was thinking about entrepreneurship for some time now, but really trying it put me way out off my comfort zone.

The Two-Day Challenge

The Entrepreneurial Challenge was a two-day challenge. The challenge had several tasks that we, as a group, had to finish. Its purpose was to see how we approach and how we deal with tasks (minor challenges), without really focusing on how many of them we can achieve. Our tasks were:

• Develop and launch a social media campaign to inspire Helsinki youth to become entrepreneurs
• Host an event for as many people as possible
• Meet with a celebrity or public figure that you admire
• Perform an act of kindness
• Pitch your business concept to investors
• Visit another startup hub and interview an entrepreneur

After some brainstorming, my team and I decided to combine some of these tasks with an idea that they can together be used as part of our first task: Develop and launch a social media campaign to inspire Helsinki youth to become entrepreneurs.

For our campaign, we created two hashtags: #BuildYourOwnFuture and #whoispowerful. From there we created our Facebook group and connected it to an Instagram account.

In our campaign, we included the “Act of kindness” task. My team and I looked at this task as if the main purpose of it was to motivate young people to be more confident and to believe in themselves by asking them a question: Who is the most powerful person in your life? After that, we would hand out a little gift. The gift was an answer to the question, which actually turned out to be a mirror. People’s reactions were really positive and while doing this task we had a lot of fun. One of my roles included filming those reactions and creating a video for our campaign.

The next thing that we did was an interview with a young entrepreneur. We did a couple of them. One interview was with Ruby Nguyen from Astrid Concept House. Her idea of owning her own container cafe came since she was in High School. Ruby decided to quit her job at the restaurant, and even with some obstacles along the way, she started her company. She is now happy with her freedom of creativity inside her own business.

The other interview was with Jesse Ellonen from DieNo Games. The interview was broadcasted live in our Facebook group. He talked about the problem he is facing when people are not taking him or his idea seriously from the start. He pointed out the importance of networking. From his experience, talking to people face to face has a bigger impact than sending a nicely polished email. His advice is to take small goals as small steps one at a time and to be ready to accept failure since most of the people do not succeed from the first time.

What was interesting to me is that people were ready and open to sharing their stories, with a great desire to inspire others. They had some good advice for young people who were thinking about starting something on their own but had many concerns about their journey.

Teamwork

Even though we were a group of skilled individuals we had some communication difficulties and some differences showed when we started approaching the problem. But, our creativity and dedication helped us overcome our issues and in the end, we worked well together.

I had a great time doing the Entrepreneurial Challenge. Once I stepped out of my comfort zone I actually started learning and that is how entrepreneurship works. I had an amazing and inspiring team: Anette, Ashwini, Alejandra, Gonzalo and Yicci. Given the short time we had, I think we did a good job.

Can entrepreneurship be learned?

During the Challenge, we also had an assignment to think about the question in the title. One of the biggest traits of an entrepreneur is having the growth mindset and according to psychologist Carol Dweck growth mindset can be learned.

You can learn and be taught, and you can teach entrepreneurship. This is the “Growth Mentality”.

Dweck’s research challenges the common belief that intelligent people are born smart. In her book “Mindset” she argues about different approaches to learning and explains the differences between growth and a fixed mindset.

Having a growth mindset and confidence are the most important factors in becoming an entrepreneur. With this Challenge, I have learned that you cannot become an entrepreneur if you actually do not try to become one. As Jesse Ellonen said in his interview, you are learning by doing it.

For reading more about The Shortcut and their Catalyst Programme, follow them on Facebook or subscribe to their newsletter.