Good recipes for entrepreneurial cooperation from Business Kitchen

”If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen!” they say. Well, few of us Young Innovative Entrepreneurs’ project workers from Lapland University of Applied Sciences took the challenge and headed off to Oulu, Finland to benchmark an intriguing place called Business Kitchen.

We had heard only positive things about the Business Kitchen before, but the innovative entity sort of surprised us, and furthermore, inspired us. As described in their website, ”Business Kitchen is the first place in Oulu which truly brings together different actors from entrepreneurial fields under the same roof, presenting a unique way for making things happen”.

Principal Lecturer Jouko Isokangas from Oulu University of Applied Sciences welcomed us to Oulu and gave us a brief introduction to the history and general principles of the Business Kitchen. Isokangas pointed out that Business Kitchen brings the resources and expertise of the University of Oulu and the Oulu University of Applied Sciences for enterprises to utilize. The aim, of course, is to increase business. At the same time, it allows students and staff to embrace the entrepreneurial orientation.

After the introduction we jumped into the car and took a short trip to the Oulu city centre where the Business Kitchen is located. Quite an excellent location in the middle of everything!

Business Kitchen offers a possibility to utilize the open working space 24/7. The doors are open for everyone on workdays from 8.30 am to 4 pm, and it has more than 1000 visitors every month. Innovative working surroundings enable to organize meetings anytime and anywhere. The focal point of the Business Kitchen though, of course, is the kitchen area.

The list of parties involved in the Business Kitchen is quite impressive as it truely combines just about all the actors that an entrepreneur can benefit from. Here’s a tip what one can find behind the doors of Business Kitchen:

• Demola Oulu produces demos, innovation skills, entrepreneurship culture, and activates university-business collaboration.
• Oulu UAS Business Incubator is a service for students and starting entrepreneurs to turn a business idea into a business plan.
• Oulu Student Entrepreneurship Society, OuluSES, is an open community for students who are interested in entrepreneurship and self-development.
• Business Blender services are business development services from the Business Kitchen.
• RIPA Business Services offers students’ knowledge for entrepreneurs’ needs.
• BusinessOulu is the driver of businesses and industries, and it aims at supporting creation and competitiveness of businesses and success in the Oulu region.
• Oulun Seudun Uusyrityskeskus is a counseling service for new and newly
  
  established companies.
• Oulu Business Accelerator coaches start-ups aiming at rapid international growth.
• Design Center Servo is a cluster of various actors who aim to develop the business of their customers with the tools of interface design, industrial design and service productizing.
• A number of Start-up businesses are located in the second floor of the Business Kitchen.

 

For universities’ students the working method is co-creation, and the working teams usually consist of not only students but actors from business life also. As an open innovation environment, Business Kitchen can offer many ways to enhance knowledge and expertise: networking, workshops, international contacts, pitching, learning by doing, sharing thoughts, co-creational working, and the list goes on and on. Business Kitchen is a centre of entrepreneurship for universities’ and the pedagogical point of view has been a priority from the get go as Business Kitchen has been planned and developed.

As we drove back home from this very fascinating visit, one element of the Business Kitchen concept was uppermost in our minds: cooperation. Business Kitchen really brings together not only the universities’ and entrepreneurs but also the actors from city of Oulu. It’s an unique innovation- and entrepreneurial community which gathers people together despite the organizational boundaries. By providing the spaces, different functions and expertise as well as creating ”swarming” and chances to meet people, new business, communities and ideas are automatically born.

Business Kitchen’s way of bringing all the entrepreneurial (support) actors together in cooperation challenges us to think how it could be possible to create an innovative environment in different circumstances. For example, in our sparsely populated regions, the existing operating environments and infrastructure as well as each municipality’s/city’s different business structure, population and already formed collaborations can produce challenges in the Barents region.

What kind of innovative, entrepreneurial cooperation would be needed and possible to organize in the Barents region? And how can we turn those so called challenges into opportunities and strenghts?

P.S. Have you heard about the Polar Bear Pitching 2014 organized on February 7th? Yeah, the brilliant mind behind it can also be traced back to the Business Kitchen. It was unbelievable to learn that the event was held only few months after the original idea of it came to life.

Text and photos:

Minttu Merivirta, Project Planner, Lapland UAS