
Cheers from Portugal – lets meet the superheroes in here!
- Written by Henna Kaariainen
- Published in Archive, English
- Permalink
There’s an interesting buzz going on around creative entrepreneurship here in Porto. Next Tuesday there will be an event around that theme organized by the Serralves Foundation, and already 400 people have subscribed from the Creative Industries, Incubators, Universities, Vocational Schools, Business Associations, Art Students, Entrepreneurs, Financial Institutions, Governmental organizations, City Councils, etc.
Monkey Business and Tiimiakatemia are here too sharing the experience we’ve got on creating entrepreneurship by means of dialogue, learning by doing and applying theory into practice. We are also having a greatest guy from Aalto University, Oliver Saarinen on board as a speaker. Aalto & us were both invited because one of the goals of the forum is to show and disseminate international best practices about entrepreneurship development, the new role of incubators in relation to recent urban dynamics as well as new tools and strategies on creative industries incubation. Monkeys have been involved in Tiimiakatemia’s international expansion since it’s beginning in 2005, and the latest story we have to share comes from Brazil, where I’ve been one of the protagonists leading TA to land in there. Now Portugal is the place to share about it. Other international examples invited are Citilab Cornellá and Amsterdam University. The national stories come from Creative Industries regional cluster called ADDICT, Portuguese institute for SME’s called IAPMEI, ECBN and Invicta Angels.
One goal of this forum is to contribute to the creation of a creative industries incubators network, once in the last couple of years, around 10 new incubators were funded and created in the Porto region, and there are no practices of cooperation or shared tools or strategies among them. Finnish initiatives, including Tiimiakatemia, have been present in Portugal and Porto area already earlier. When Y4 won the European Entrepreneurship Award it’s leader Petri Palviainen got in touch with the main organizer of this forum Paulo Alves, and shared about Tiimiakatemia with him. Then in 2010 Jaana Hiltunen, Ana Aguirre and Sari Veripää visited Porto to talk about Tiimiakatemia in various forums. Apart from that variious Portuguese people have visited us in Jyväskylä, Finland. There’s certainly something is bubbling under in here and we’re ready for letting it to come in the air and transform into a visible, tangible action!
If you want to follow us on twitter on Tuesday use the hashtag #inserralves. You can also see the presentations afterwards at Serralves website. I’m currently figuring out what would be the way to put mine online since it’s rather big and with keynote & some videos that won’t play from PDF. Tips welcome, I’m learning here!
Cheers and good days,
Henna Monkey