Last week I was up in Trondheim, Norway and caught the tail-end of their Startup Weekend. They had only enough people for about five teams to come together, but just the buzz around all these new ideas coming together was awesome to be a part of, if only for a moment. Luckily our Helsinki readers can participate in a Startup Weekend coming up over the 54 hours of this weekend.
This iteration of Startup Weekend Helsinki is focused on sustainability and the bioeconomy. They’re looking for multidisciplinary teams – like coders, designers, idea people, business people, and basically anyone to come together and put together the products and services for the future of sustianibility and the bioeconomy.
Startup Weekend has built up an amazing global brand by having very well managed events that really add value to their participants. The way it works is that anyone is welcome to pitch their startup idea and receive feedback from their peers. Teams organically form around the top ideas (as determined by popular vote) and then it’s a 54 hour frenzy of business model creation, coding, designing, and market validation. The weekend ends with participants presenting the developed product or service prototypes, viable business models or other solutions to local entrepreneurial leaders with another opportunity for critical feedback.
So if you’ve got a business idea that could make the world a better place, or if you just want to help build something beautiful over a weekend, go to the Startup Weekend Helsinki website to register before the weekend starts! I’ve only seen good things happen to the people have participated, and it’s great covering products, like this week’s article on Blink, that came out of a Startup Weekend and is seeing massive attention.
We’ll be there as well, and will give out free tickets to Arctic15: Exit Path, our startup conference coming up May 27-28 in Helsinki to the winning team. See you then!
