Final Words

I still remember when I last year came up with the thought of organising the Prodeko USA project. Luckily I bumped into Lauri and Mikko who shared the same excitement. We decided to have a beer (or few) around this idea and the faith of this project was clear when everyone of us got just more exited when we started throwing more ideas on the table. When you gather three extremely motivated students around one thing there is really nothing that can stop it happening ;)

Right from the beginning the intra- and entrepreneurship were pretty clear choices as the main focus for the project because they have become significant subjects to Finnish economy only in few years. This can be seen many ways in Finland. The amount of startup companies has increased significantly. Slush event is gathering record number of investors and startups around the word to Helsinki and the low level non-profit entrepreneurial activity in Finland is the most active in the whole world.* We, students, have founded nearly 20 Entrepreneurship Societies around Finland, we have build the largest venturing event in Europe and send over 100 students to the best startups in the world in Silicon Valley. All of this only in the past five years. (* Creating university-based entrepreneurial ecosystems evidence from emerging world leaders, Dr Ruth Graham June 2014, MIT Skoltech Initiative)

So… we have only one thing in our mind. How can we do this all even faster, leaner and better! And what would be a better place to learn this intra- and entrepreneurship than United States. The place where the society is based on the thought that everyone can build their own dreams. Without questioning, US has the worlds biggest startup hub: the Bay area which include Sand Francisco and Silicon Valley. In that area alone there is 47 Unicorn (evaluation over 1 billion dollars) startups (non-IPO) and 22 Unicorn startups that went public (IPO) since 2010. The next biggest amount of Unicorns is 16 which are located in New York. On top of this the Unicorn count excludes all the major players that have head quarters in Silicon Valley like Google (which recruits nearly 1000 persons per month), Apple, Yahoo, etc. The Bay area also holds over 60% of the whole US venture capital money which is of course result of the vast amount of successful companies through out decades. (source: CB Insights, Mattermark SparkLabs Global Ventures)

As I already said we also wanted to learn intrapreneurship which is actually the harder than entrepreneurship in many ways. That is the reason we headed to New York and especially to Seattle where we visited the Boeing and Microsoft. These giants have been re-inventing themselves for decades by developing internal processes and creating new products constantly. It is extremely hard to change the course of enormous companies and without mentioning the big changes in the company’s structure. Hence, we have seen big organisations fall like Kodak or the one that every Finn knows, Nokia.

On January we had our first meeting with the whole team where we divided our responsibilities. That was the moment when the magic started to happen and 18 Prodeko students started working! Suddenly we had bunch of visits to big companies, startups, universities, local accelerators, a course to prepare us for the trip and interesting cases to work on. This whole journey of Prodeko USA project has been an eye opening experience for the whole project team. We have learned about the differences between Finnish and American working and corporation cultures, how development is done in small startups as well as in big organisations. One big learning has also been that how much the market size matters in the growing opportunities. We have visited the worlds biggest and most influential companies as well as the fast growing small bootstrap startups. These experiences made this journey priceless.

I want to thank Microsoft, Finnair, Nokia, McKinsey & Company and our other partners who made this all possible. It has been wonderful journey and learning experience for all of us and all the partners were part of this experience. Last but definitely not the least I want to thank the whole Prodeko USA team! Lauri, Mikko, Joona, Auri, Tony, Valtteri, Lotta, Jyri, Simo, Aleksi, Andreas, Pyry, Laura, Ville, Mikael, Marianne, Samuli ja Anna it has really been a pleasure to work with you all during this project!

Best,

Riko