This past week has been busy.

Exciting, interesting, challenging and definitely busy.

 

Anna-Marja and Cait have been touring Southern Finland visiting key partners and some very interesting potential clients. They have made 5 corporate presentations, attended 12 meetings and 1 event (excellent launch of Spark-Up business incubator in Turku), met with more than 35 new people and some old friends and travelled many kilometres in varying November weather.

 

Interestingly in many ways the challenges facing innovation support and companies in Finland are the same - they want more skills and confidence in presenting their company and products/services to International clients and investors and they want more and easier access to new contacts in their market areas.

 

Thankfully SSC are ready for them - we have SSC Internationalisation and Business Jumpstart courses, much of which has been specifically developed for Finnish needs and have already been successfully road-tested.

Lots more to talk about!

 

 

We have entered exciting times at SSC. We are expanding.

 

It is exciting, we can do so much more with extra resource to call upon and extra skill sets to work with.

It is scary as there is an extra responsibility. The ethos of what has been created over the past 5 years is precious and we want to ensure that remains intact but we also want to balance new ideas, new approaches and fresh thinking.

It is flattering, we have new people that are experts in their field, highly respected individuals, who have worked with the SSC core team before and these people still want to join, to work with us and together take the SSC forwards. That increase in belief of what we are doing is very powerful and energising.

 

For a CEO of a small organisation it is particularly challenging. Inducting new people into the team means that you have to articulate and formalise thoughts, concepts and methods that you take for granted. It is a great opportunity to take a pause and reflect - is what we are doing today what we actually set out to achieve and are the deviations justifiable? Fortunately this work has gone very well for SSC and we all feel that the values that we wanted to convey are still at the forefront of what we do and how we do it.

 

Formalising procedures, processes and bringing some regular systems into place is still on-going. That's harder as we have to work out what happened historically, compare with what does happen today and project to what could happen in the future. This too is interesting and worthwhile.And whilst all that is on-going we have still to achieve the daily on-going tasks.

 

We are growing up in very many ways.

 

 

I've just got back from Helsinki where we have given a Business JumpStart course introducing scientists to business concepts by using their own ideas for future businesses and taking them from Ground Zero to pitching to investors in 48 hours. Intensive, for sure, but the participants were very much up to the challenge and it has been a great success for all involved.

 

 

Team Breeze, winners of the Teamwork Challenge

 
 
Overall Winners Team Home Med


I'm proud to say it was my idea, it was my concept and I believed all along it could be as good at it actually was. I knew these students could do it, I knew that what they could produce in that timeframe would be worthy of the esteemed panel we gathered, and I knew we would be able to create the learning experience and materials to enable them to work to their highest potential.

I've seen similar happen before, this wasn't a totally blue-skies approach, but it was something unique and we were in uncharted waters.  I had faith that it could be done.

However, I also knew that it wasn't something that I could do alone. I know my skill set, and it's not complete. To get to the level of training materials and to have the quality of mentoring that I wanted to provide I needed assistance and complementary additional skills and knowledge. I'm lucky, SSC already has that built into its structure through my colleagues Frederic and Sheila. I know that with them we can together provide top quality lectures, backed up by real insight from real experiences, and because of the familiarity and co-operation between us this will be delivered in a way that allows us to have confidence in what each other will provide and therefore the focus becomes the needs of each individual attending the course.

Given our philosophy, this new product needed to have new branding, from the outset, not a last minute effort. The name of the course will be trademarked and through the extra skills provided by Cesign graphic design we have fresh interesting, vibrant branding for the logo, the course folders and slides.

Is that all the teamwork required then? No, not by far. The success of this event required even more teamwork than just ourselves. We had support from the University itself. Eeva Sievi, the co-ordinator of the Health Sciences Doctoral School, was our link to making this happen. She arranged the venue, she recruited the attendees, she provided the physical bits and pieces that don't easily fit in a suitcase, and she enjoyed seeing the success too.

Is that it then? No, not even then – this success also depended on getting the right panel. Not just a group of randomly chosen contacts and acquaintances in the local area, but having people who really understand the fears of a first ever business pitch situation and really understand what would be required if the participants in the future decide to do this for real with the same or other ideas.

What about then? - well, nearly.....all the ingredients at the ready, the last bit of success comes from making sure the participants get what they expect and need from the event and are in a comfortable enough mental place to be able to try new thoughts, and learn new skills, and that is partly down to enabling teamwork with them and within their groups throughout the course.

So where does my pride actually come from? In all honesty, from seeing the faces of the teams at the end as the presentations were awarded. From being in the room with happy, smiling, enthusiastic people who didn't know each other 3 days before and who had shared a positive fun experience. It comes from being allowed to be part of that overall team – the 16 students, the 5 panel, the 3 trainers and 1 Co-ordinator.