We’ve been working on Aaltoes development today with the new and former boards of Aaltoes and active team-members. We’d love to have feedback from everyone reading this, so please comment! I’m just quickly going to comment on some of the stuff we’ve been working on here.
Communications and objective
One of the problems we have identified is that our communications about what we do hasn’t been working. Many students and researchers now that we exist, but many don’t know exactly what we do. The problem has been that we haven’t had a unified message that we’re communicating.
We want to be able to get the same message through to everyone. We’ve created new objectives and pitches for Aaltoes. One description we’ve come up with is: ‘doing everything we can to help students and researchers create more companies’. We want to keep it simple and understandable. What do you think? It used to be ‘catalyzing high-growth startups at Aalto University’… We thought that was a bit too complex.
About the objective, it hasn’t changed much:
In 5 years we want that at least 1 international successful company has come from Aaltoes. We want to create some stories such as Spotify and Skype. This requires that we create a lot of startups from Aalto.
At the Development weekend
Attracting new students and researchers.
We also want to reach more students and researchers. We have been doing a quite good job with the students, but we want to develop our relations to researchers. We’re going to start a project where we will go meet all professors to identify opportunities for collaboration and discuss how the commercialization of research could be more efficient and what Aaltoes can do. We want to create a lot of events through which student teams can find research to commercialize.
Aalto Ventures Park
One very important topic here is Aalto Ventures Park (Aaltovp). Actually Aaltovp is already open for startups, so people can just come there and use it as their workspace. Now we of course need more startups and people to come there. We’re planning to organize a lot of events to get people to find Aaltovp. One problem is that it’s a bit difficult to get keys for the place at the moment. We’re also renovating the place all the time, and we’re planning to invite design students there to work to make the space work. Do you have any ideas for the space? How do we get entrepreneurial students and researchers to come and work there together?
So if you have an idea or startup you are working on, contact Tuomo Kuikka (firstname.lastname@aaltoes.com) for keys. Or just come there, probably someone will be there to open the door (Betonimiehenkuja 3)
We’ve also started working on other issues such as partnerships, international relations, financing etc.
We’re going to keep you up to date, remember to comment!
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Thanks Riku! Maybe we should also research some very tamwork intensive courses (PDP, ITP etc.) and see if the teams formed in them would be interested in continuing working together in a startup project and provide them with the means. It takes time to learn to know people..
Hey you could also go through these different patterns of organising a hackerspace in relation to AaltoVP: http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Design_Patterns . I’d say AaltoVP reminds me most of the following, any thought how to tackle these:
The Infrastructure Pattern
Problem: You have a chicken-and-egg-problem: What should come first? Infrastructure or projects?
Implementation: Make everything infrastructure-driven. Rooms, power, servers, connectivity, and other facilities come first. Once you have that, people will come up with the most amazing projects you didn’t think about in the first place.
The Community Pattern
Problem: How should your group communicate?
Implementation: You are hackers, you know what to do. Stop slacking and set up a mailing list, a wiki, and an IRC channel. You will need all three. Think about a platform for discussion, storage for documentation and real-time communication. <- This we could try set-up asap
The Plenum Pattern
Problem: You want to resolve internal conflicts, exercise democratic decision-making, and discuss recent issues and future plans.
Implementation; Have a regular meeting with possibly all members. Have an agenda and set goals. Make people commit themselves to tasks. Write down minutes of the meeting and post them on a mailing list and/or Wiki. Go for the only date that works: once a week. Weird dates like “first full-moon after the third Friday” will never work. Likewise doesn’t every other week or anything similar.
The U23 Pattern
Problem: Your older members graduate from college or get married. Your space needs fresh blood.
Implementation: Recruit young people through a challenge you set up for them, in form of a course that spans several weeks. Overwhelm them with problems from hardware and software hacking and let them solve it in teams. Prepare for the challenge and tutor them, but give them room to experiment. Retire after the team-building and let the smartest of the young ones run the space.
Any ideas? : )
Oh yeah, and the infamous TUESDAY PATTERN : )
The Tuesday Pattern
Problem: Every weekday sucks. You will not find any day when every hacker can attend a meeting. Someone always has an appointment.
Implementation:Meet on Tuesday. Since all days are equally bad, just pick the Tuesday. End of discussion.
About the mission ‘tag line’, why not refine it even further? How about just, ‘Helping students and researchers create companies’ or ‘going the distance to help students and researchers create companies’?
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Great job!
What adds most value to Aalto students, researchers and pre-seed startups: I think bringing the best resourses available:
1: entrepreneurs from tech, business and Design to form teams. 2: Tecnology and research from labs to be commersialized.
2: Some seed funding from (tekes, angels, earlystage vc
3: Internationally experienced entrepreneurs to coach the teams.
4: International exposure and contacts
one way to do this is via event: aaltoes ventures track?
Comments?
That ‘going the distance to help students and researchers create companies’ communicates the right message, but I think we want to keep it simpler. We’ll have to remember that. We actually want to try not to say that we ‘help’ anyone, because we just want to catalyze the creation of companies by brining the right people and resources together.
That’s why we’re just saying ‘ doing everything we can…’ I don’t think the ‘help’ word should be in there at all, since I don’t think that any effort to try to ‘help’ in creating companies will be successful. In a broader sense, yes, that’s what we do, but more by helping people help themselves…
‘Bringing students, researchers and resources together to create startups’ ?