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[Web 2.0] Innovation called Talkoot
28.04.2009 - 17:45

Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. Sometimes old ways are better than a bunch of new ones. Folks at Aalto University wanted to speed up the creation of start-ups by adopting a traditional Finnish form of collaboration called Talkoot.

Student at the new Aalto University, which was created by combining in a groundbreaking way Helsinki University of Technology, Helsinki School of Economics, and University of Art and Design Helsinki, have created Aalto Entrepreneurship Society (AES) with the objective of promoting entrepreneurial thinking among the students. Traditionally, for Finnish university students starting a company of their own has not been a number one choice. Rather, the best students have been more interested in making career in large enterprises like Nokia. However, the world changes and large companies lose part of their attraction as even the biggest conglomerates are forced to lay-off people.

During the last week of April, AES arranged the first ever happening called Startup Talkoot. The goal was to gather a group of people with very different backgrounds, i.e. students of Aalto University, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and experts in different fields such as technology, business strategy, IPR issues etc. One of the master minds behind the Startup Talkoot event was Peter Vesterbacka, whom many people know from the time he was running the Mobile Bazaar activities at HP. Mobile Bazaar team arranged camp meetings, where a bunch of people gathered together for a couple of days to create ideas and solve problems.

The central idea of Startup Talkoot event is that starting a new business requires all kinds of skills and knowledge, which are not always easy to get hold on. Or at least it can be very costly if you need to buy this expertise in the market. Startups created by students are often operating with very limited capital, so in practice they do not have the possibility of using external experts, even if it would be very useful or sometimes even critical for their startup project.

But no worries, luckily we have in Finland this thing called “Talkoot”, which refers to the centuries-old habit of people working together to build a church or a road, in general something big and complex requiring lots of resources and different kinds of skills or even some special tools. In Talkoot, everybody does what they are good at. Nobody gets paid because the essence of Talkoot is “I scratch your back, you scratch mine”. In other words, if I help you to solve your problem or develop your idea further, next time you will help me in return.

As Peter Vesterbacka pointed out in his opening speech at the Startup Talkoot event, the history of Linux and MySQL shows that the old tradition of Talkoot still prevails in Finland – and also in other parts of the world. But in today’s Web 2.0 world, Talkoot does not happen anymore only locally and physically, but in a global and virtual context. According to Vesterbacka, the concept of Startup Talkoot has raised interest also at leading universities such as Stanford and Princeton. There seems to be interest to adopt the concept of Startup Talkoot created in Finland also in other parts of the world. Perhaps in a similar fashion as the Mobile Monday concept, which has spread from Helsinki to tens of cities around the globe.

Albeit the Startup Talkoot concept is still in an early phase of its evolution, the idea appears to be great. An old-timer like me, with 25 years of history in the ICT industry and management consulting, starts immediately thinking about issues like how to protect the ideas presented in Talkoot, how to make sure that those who give also get something in return, or how to eliminate the free-riders. But as the Open Source world has demonstrated, big things can be achieved if we work together. Against this background it looks like Startup Talkoot is building on the key megatrends in the Web 2.0 era. 

By Jarkko Vesa, Not Innovated Here, April 28, 2009

In Finland we have this thing called Talkoot.

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