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!
