Now, that's an idea with growth potential!
The idea behind Aalto Venture Garage’s entrepreneurship programmes is to find the rough diamonds and let them shine. So far a few mobile innovations are under development, and one rainforest in a box.
Living Canvas took home the Summer of Startups Best Demo. The 3-metre tall and 1,5 metre wide rainforest wall waters the plants daily and all the excess water is reused the next day. Photo: Charlotta Helena (Flickr.com).
Technical Research Centre’s old warehouse in Aalto University’s campus in Otaniemi was a hotspot for many innovations during this summer. An enthusiastic group of 20 to 30-year-old university students enrolled in the Summer of Startups, the first ever summer programme in Finland where students with potential and scalable start-up business ideas get mentoring and coaching for their innovations.
According to the leader of the programme Ville Simola, there was a demand for this kind of opportunity for talented young people to work on their start-up ideas instead of getting a typical summer job. Therefore three student-led entrepreneurship organizations game up with the concept of Summer of Startups last spring, and within three weeks the programme was up and running.
The pace was quite the same as during the programme as the 35 students in teams of 2 to 4 refined their ideas into prototypes in eight weeks.
The Summer of Startups brought together young people from Finland, Sweden, Germany, China, and Ethiopia. They are students in Aalto university’s schools of art and design, science and technology, and economics as well as from other universities in the capital region and universities abroad.
Most of the ideas had to do with information and communication technologies. Applications for mobile devices and web can be implemented in reasonably short time spans, and they often have genuine growth potential. However, Simola says that all kinds of projects are welcome to the future programmes. This year the Living Canvas –project presented their idea of a rainforest atmosphere in plain offices.
The startup projects were introduced to the audience and jury at the end of August. The winner was Arada Services with a concept that is similar to the one in use in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area, SMS-based ticketing system for public transportation.
The next step is the Aalto Venture Garage’s Bootcamp, starting 17 September, where some of the potential startups from the summer as well as possibly some other promising “ventures” will be validated in the hopes that among them is the next big thing.
“This first year is just warm-up, and there is more to come,” Simola promises, so start visioning!
To find out more about the past, on-going and future programmes, visit Aalto Venture Garage’s website.
Elisa Lautala works as web editor for University of Helsinki's Faculty of Science. Elisa likes all kinds of cultural events, good books, warm weather, and aqua-jogging.