Cursor's Mikko Kähärä talks about encouraging innovation in Finland

good morning everybody my name is mikko kahara and i'm the head of ict growth services at the at the corsora the company which is behind behind play game industry hub i'm here to talk to you this morning about about a development program that is focused on on developing this startup ecosystem in in southern finland what we've been running here what started up a spin-off factory is it's a it's an eu funded development program from support by the european regional development fund when we are running this program together with uh university of helsinki the palmetto units unit turco university of platform applied sciences and la perez university of technology the main idea between behind this program this two-year program has been to develop new innovative entrepreneurship

and develop an actual acceleration program that is top-notch and that will remain to be a very integral component of of developing the ecosystem in the future also the engage international international communities and activities through our startups and let's go a little bit too fast here and also help universities build a path for commercialization when it comes to their research student activities and such so where does the whole startup of spinoff factory and the the acceleration activities fall into here's what player does in in in sort of in in general terms what we do working with vendor gym is the name of our exploration program so we are these sort of two two uh right side activities so going from sort of more

scale scalable businesses more scalable game game companies as well towards the growth services where we support support such things as international financing and such we operate from kotka which is about 130 kilometers east from from helsinki easily reached through through the through the airport and we are close close to the russian border only 225 kilometers from st petersburg so russia does play a role in our activities quite heavily so why would we as a regional development company support the grow the startup scene southeastern finland especially uh cumulus have been hit quite quite badly with the economic downturn and the changes in industrial landscape we have we have a high level of unemployment and we we are in a desperate need to revitalize and

re-imagine our economic base so we are very open to support all kinds of new new initiatives that spring up from our region uh games industry is one and the whole startup startup startup ecosystem is second so where we see it from these startups from from different kinds of new initiatives can we we can bring up the next success stories that will become role models for for new entrepreneurs and they will um open up new avenues of new businesses to be developed and that naturally goes for developing ecosystems there's going to be suppliers and all kinds of different actors that can sort of grow up grow around those but it does take the course of you know pushing pushing a little bit uh pushing the little bit unpredictable lines of business as well so games industry not

it's not a simple thing to explain to or what wasn't in a few years back wasn't the simple thing to explain to local uh decision makers that this is the area that we want to emphasize but they've been very supportive since then so basically successful startups are they're in the core of of creating what what the next chapter will be not only that they do bring in economic activity or new jobs but they help create a new culture and that culture of uh success of of entrepreneurship of international international activities and all that it's as a culture it's a very strong strong base to build on and we're sort of creating the foundations for for future with these activities so

when we started planning this program naturally we started to think about what what do the startups need in order to succeed and there's a huge huge list of stuff that they need first thing is the first thing though is money because with money you can solve all kinds of problems so that meant that we had to focus quite quite heavily on funding on on getting those investments in into the companies especially in the states when they the companies are experiencing the death valley phase uh naturally they need to have talent and usually startup teams they they're not complete in the beginning so you need to supplement that with all kinds of different areas could it be leadership or marketing tech what not so we needed a good group of people good network of people who can sort of step in and help these these companies out in the early stages when on the areas that they they are lacking talent and then it's the whole other areas where where you do need

expertise help as well coming from sort of lawyers to lawyers to uh accountants and all that and we try to help with that as well office space yeah naturally we you need a place where we where you can work and hopefully you can work with other like-minded people so we have here we have a space like that in in in kotkan labaran called level up so the the whole idea the main idea of what we wanted to do in so facing the needs of startups was link them up with people who already done done that exercise before many times and have successfully built up companies have successfully or have had bankruptcies have failed in their business and learned the lessons so we wanted to hook these aspiring young startups to these kind of veterans and see what happens so very sort of clear definition of an exploration program so we figured out well naturally i mean

when we started started building up this program realized that well we don't have these things in the house so we're going to need very strong partnerships and i'm not going to walk you through all this stuff but the idea here is that in the input we need to get best possible people to into the program best possible teams and in the process side we need to have the best possible coaches best possible expert networks and in the end we will have convincing uh fundable companies here's the core team uh called the vendor gem network it's actually a vintage um limited nowadays but uh i'm going to talk you all no i'm just not just kidding auntie villain and marcos romagno voila nicole glassela and i we've formed the the core team on supporting these these companies and runs around the

boot camps and and support support programs along with about 30 different experts in different different fields just keep jumping uh the vintage and exploration program uh consists of boot camps so we had three boot camps in the during this uh during the start of a spinoff factory pro project averaging about seven seven startups on the go three four week very intense training workshops um it's very demanding period for uh for a startup they need to define who they are what what they want what their objectives are and uh what what do they have as sort of unique skills what do they what are they lacking and all that so working with this very heavily on their on their strategy how they're gonna take over the world with their products um and quite heavily focusing on on finance so

basically what kind of a seed story you can create what's the best message that you can show from what wherever your team stan stands and what you what you need to need to do in order to be fundable and and and go forward from that so after these boot camps we basically had such an open-ended period of time where we can support these companies on different kind of modules um individually or in very small in smaller groups focusing on say branding for a long or for a game game company finding a publisher for example doing that exercise with a company for for basically as long as it takes for them to get to the goal uh then international activities so we've taken these companies out of the world uh

mostly meeting investors we had uh pitching events in london and singapore in the past past eight months basically open stuff we had 10 companies pitching to say 60 50 local investors and we also had like these different kinds of investor trips where we took a small group of companies to meet investors at their own sites these have been very very uh very well received activities so we're not alone in this process so aside from us running the exploration program and the international activities we have university of helsinki on board as well and what they're doing is is developing their sort of tech transfer program and in the ecosystem way of thinking they want to find those really those gold nuggets within their their

organization in their research in their different faculties that are business ideas that can be scalable can be driven as uh as companies are fun that are well well fundable so university of helsinki has been doing all kinds of activities towards this and and this is this case also in in the start of a spinoff factory program it's a long road and they develop quite a lot of models for that and uh the idea is basically for them to build up this next stage of of of startups spring from the uh from the different faculties and massive amount of research that they do at the university of helsinki they were for example helsinki think company is a very good example of that these things are really popping up really strongly right now and as as a community of entrepreneurship and a sort of common space for for

helsinki university based startups then in turko their role has been um to develop student entrepreneurship so they'd be working on creating a commercialization model in a sense of combining the the methods of lean startup thinking and mentoring the the student entrepreneurs so they had two two doing two terms groups of students that they've been running through this program and some some new companies have been formed at least the uh the um students are much better aware of what it means to be an entrepreneur and this uh they're also engaged the the local local serial entrepr entrepreneur and business angel communities to come and mentor these these very young companies

which is uh has proven proven to be very very fruitful and this is kind of thinking that in the next next stage when we plan our uh new programs we know that this is something that we want to spread also to to different areas uh lapper at the uni university of technology their role has been to be a little bit introspective studying what how the whole process goes how the uh how the acceleration fits in sense of our academic standards and and analyze whether or not we're doing the right thing or not for them the main tasks have been basically doing the analysis which is that they are doing at the moment and bringing some good good and valuable feedback that we can use in order to build build something new and spread the word around on how these things what the experience and learnings have been from our point of view

so where are we today so we've had 25 companies on board here are some of their their logos about half of those are game companies half of them are other scalable ict healthcare retail stuff from sort of indoor navigation to quality assurance about 50 jobs so far have been created through through this program at least we have some involvement in creation of those jobs the process itself that was uh one of the objective was yes we piloted we've proven it's as it stands we can re uh further develop it and since vengeance has become its own company it's actually become commercial as well which is one of the one of the key

key aspects we have on the road in the last two years we've managed to create quite a lot of valuable contacts and networks in order to help the companies out better in the future help to help us create better programs to further develop the ecosystem that we have and what we've had so far as feedback from that leopard at the university of technology has gathered up together we've had very good reviews from startup side and this is something that i i i feel really proud about these companies actually feel that they've they've gotten something valuable out of our boot camps and the different investor trips and such and uh which means that we we've done at least something right but i think the most important thing is that we actually have helped these companies raise quite significant significant amount of money in early stage funding eight and a half million

million euros for 25 companies some a little bit less some a little bit more but a lot of these companies have basically means means that they need in order to go further develop their their products further develop their their marketing and really reach the next stage and that's the whole objective objective of this program and one of the important aspects here is as well that now now that these companies do have these sort of built-in skills and experience of getting the pre-seed or seed stage funding and if if their products are developed well and then mark their hypothesis on the markets hold and they actually can reach reach uh say pilot markets somewhere and improve their case it's not really a big thing to go for the series say and really become big and scale up and that's

that's the uh sort of lasting lasting exp experience that these companies can take away from or they fail and but then again people don't try again you already have the skills so what's going to happen next so we're we're basically so now we're closing the start of a spinoff factory program at the end of this month which is not really the end it's it's it's the end of the beginning so our next steps in in developing the startup ecosystem will include strengthening certain spearheads that we have in sense of lines of business for example games industry we've had i said before we had about half of our companies are from games industry who participated in the program and there's a lot of a lot of a lot of things that we can do specifically to

support games industry and this is something that we we're looking to strengthen in the future in the whole whole acceleration aspect then we are going to widen the scope in a way that right now we've been focusing on very sort of ict driven companies there's a huge potential for scalable business models in more traditional businesses that people just don't know about they don't know understand the technology on how to reach those markets with a little bit of push a little bit of motivation we can spring up a lot of a lot of new business new spin-offs from uh traditional companies that have a potential to become global global success stories so a little bit more digging but you usually have companies with sound uh sound financing based already uh we are going to be very much international in the future as well so most of the

investments are done abroad so we're going to be abroad as well finland is not bad it's a good area to seek funding but there's a lot of place in the world that where it's easier that being said one of the things about the finnish finnish system is that our our government's tools for supporting uh innovation in innovative companies in in the early stage such as decades are remarkably good and they that guests and elis and all these have been very helpful in bringing these companies up and uh scaling their business even further our focus has been in sense of offering has been been very strongly towards the

startup so we've been focusing first on reaching the best possible startups we're going to keep that but on that on on other side we want to create also a solid offering for any investor who's interested in in the companies that we help and represent and also the the region that we represent and yeah we need allies as well so we'll be looking at new partnerships with with companies that can help help our companies and organizations that can help out our our startups to grow and vice versa we can help foreign foreign startups to set up base in finland for example so 12 companies most most of the who are avengers alumni are going to be pitching

on the opposite opposite hall at 2 2 p.m today so if any of you are an investor or just have a bit of spare change your pocket in the range of several hundred thousand you're very welcome to come and hear hear the actual actual uh everyday life and the possibilities of these startups that's my name is mikko kaharanda thank you very much for your attention