Blogpost will be published on the website of Tamk. 

Writers: Nuppu Laaksonen, Rugilė Komžaitė

DAY 1

We started our Nordic & Baltic Business Innovation Intensive week on Sunday the 7th of April. On the first day, all countries were presented by students and the whole week was introduced to us by the course teacher Niina. The theme for this five-day intensive week was Multiform Marketing of Experience-Based Product & Service Innovations.

After presentations at Y-Kampus, we had time for team building activities and dinner at one of the best pizzerias in Tampere: Sitko.  It was a fun, interesting and relaxing way to start our intensive week. The baseline for teamwork is always to get to know each other, and in this case, we also explored new, (at least for most of us unfamiliar)  spots in Tampere city.

In this intensive week there were participants from Norway, Estonia, Lithuania, and of course from Finland. In our group 2 there was six members: Joar Gamst Johansen, Mehruba Haque, Ankur Singh Rana, Nuppu Laaksonen, Rugilė Komžaitė, Johanna Tara.

DAY 2

On Monday 8th we got an assignment from Business Tampere, which is the economic development agency in the Tampere region. They promote investments, attract talents and create the environment for businesses in the region.

Our assignment was to create a marketing plan for Blink, which is Business Tampere’s digital business community that offers its members opportunities to grow their businesses together.

After getting the assignment, norwegian teacher gave us a lecture about pitching. He truly pitched pitch very well and had everybody’s attention.

A summary of the lecture:

-Get everybody’s attention and eye contact with your audience

-Believe in your thing! If you don’t believe in your thing – nor will others

-Know your audience and dress like that

-Clarify key message this to yourself – Better have one key message than 7

-The first minute is The Most Important – Pack the main idea of your pitch in here

-Van Restoff Effet:

What comes first

BLA BLA BLA

BLA BLA BLA

THEN BLA

BLA BLA BLA

What comes last

…So focus also on the ending

-Repeat, repeat and repeat – The whole idea is repeating the key message

-Storytelling – People love stories, so make story about the product/service

– Show pictures, not only text

-Be as visual as you can – Use only short sentences and illustate.

-Keep it simple – Less is always more

-The easier you can say your points – the better it is

-Practise to Master!

Don’t do in powerpoint:

-Too many bulletpoints (that’s what I did right here)

-Write everything you are going to say

-Choose bad color schemes if you don’t want the cause nausea

After lecture we started working hard on defining problems and solutions for them. We used an innovation tool Brain pool, which was introduced to us by Norwegian team member Joar Gamst Johansen. Brainpool is also called Brainwriting pool, and it’s developed in Frankfurt Germany. You can find the information for using it at the website https://geniusrevive.com/en/brainwriting-pool-bp/.

The benefit of this tool is that you don’t have the ownership of your ideas, because you write those down anonymously in silence. That’s a way to innovate without making assumptions. Minus part is that you might lose the community feeling. All in all, when using it you can sum up what are you working towards with defining the problem efficiently.

DAY 3 & 4

Tuesday and Wednesday were for individual group work, and we also visited Proakatemia which is TAMKs’ special unit for entrepreneurship and team leadership. Some of us went also to visit Tribe, which is – at least from our point of view – a competitor to Blink. After long discussions, we started writing the report and marketing plan. Wednesday flew by finishing our report and preparing for a presentation.

Day 5

FINAL DAY! Plan for Thursday morning was to prepare our presentation and wait to see other groups’ presentations too. During afternoon we saw four different and great presentations and jury asked difficult questions. At the evening we had the last dinner together, which was at restaurant Mylläri. We felt really impatient waiting the jurys final decision of the winner, but after the dinner best team was reveal.

Aaaaaaad the winner was…….. GROUP 2!! We were really happy that Business Tampere and other members of the jury chose our solutions and marketing plan as the most beneficial for their Blink network. We can’t wait to see the what is outcome when this digi platform is really launched, and what parts of our work will be utilized.

During this week we got a challenging assignment, but we learned all the way when solving the problems they offered us. We met a great new people and widened our own networks with people from Lithuania, Norway, Estonia and Finland. And the last but not least important, we had a lot of fun and such a great time together.

Thanks to everyone who participated!

References: 

https://geniusrevive.com/en/brainwriting-pool-bp/