We are approaching new year and that means also new team to make things happen at OuluES! What are our main goals and aims for the new year? Our promise is to again deliver excellent content to support your personal development and entrepreneurial competencies from different perspectives.

New team

From the team of 2018, only the chairman, Eemeli will continue and he will be the chair also in 2019. In total the OuluES’ team will have 16 members of which 11 are part of the board of the association and 5 members are vice-members of the board. It is the biggest team the association has had in its history, but there is a real reason for that.

“We saw in 2018 that our programs and event concepts work and therefore 2019 will be a big one, since we want to scale up our concepts to reach even more students. For that we need a bigger team of doers. I see also that 2019 is the year to really strengthen our position in the entrepreneurship ecosystem before the Oulu University of Applied Sciences moves to the join campus with University of Oulu” – Eemeli Alanne, Chairman of OuluES.

The new team represents both universities in Oulu and has a variety of different skills and backgrounds. We have people with backgrounds from education, business administration, marketing, information technology, mechanical engineering, information processing science, industrial engineering and business law.

The team for 2019 is:

Eemeli Alanne Olli-Pekka Nikka Zindaba Mwanza Phiri Priya Shrestha Jenna Koski Zhanna Kresteva Quan Do Ville Saarenpää Juuso Haavisto Liese Jokiperä Veera Träskelin Noora Lievonen Elias Riihelä Elnour Ahmed Aarre Tuokko Kiran Singh

From top left: Juuso Haavisto, Elias Riihelä, Olli-Pekka Nikka, Ville Saarenpää, Eemeli Alanne, Zhanna Kresteva, Elnour Ahmed and Quan Do Front row from left: Veera Träskelin, Jenna Koski, Priya Shrestha and Noora Lievonen Missing from the picture: … — From top left: Juuso Haavisto, Elias Riihelä, Olli-Pekka Nikka, Ville Saarenpää, Eemeli Alanne, Zhanna Kresteva, Elnour Ahmed and Quan Do
Front row from left: Veera Träskelin, Jenna Koski, Priya Shrestha and Noora Lievonen
Missing from the picture: Aarre Tuokko, Liese Jokiperä, Zindaba Mwanza Phiri and Kiran Singh

Our goals for 2019

In 2018 we managed to build and strengthen our event concepts. We did the Human Accelerator -program that was a success, we were the main organizers of Startup Weekend Oulu and Django Girls Oulu. Also, the Kesäyrittäjä-project had its biggest year until now. Where do we go from here?

In 2019 one of our biggest goals is to build and expand our own actual student community. Idea of the community is to offer students the platform to be active, learn by doing and express themselves. It will also help us in doing more events and providing more content for our fellow students.

Another goal is to scale up and grow our current programs. For example, our inspiration event, Get Sh*t Done -seminar reached in two events 230 students in Oulu and the first batch of Human Accelerator was completed by 20 students. We see the potential here to grow both concepts and will do that in 2019.

We also see that in Oulu we have the opportunity to provide chances and inspiration even to secondary level students and in 2019 we will get them involved as well. It is also aligned with the higher education institutes plan to have more cooperation with the secondary level schools.

Fourth goal for us is to increase our business cooperation. We can see that business is booming in Oulu and we have had multiple success stories from Oulu in the startup scene recently. Oura, Uros, MAKNEE just to name a few. We believe that students should get connected to companies during their studying time so they will have a clearer picture of working life when they graduate. That’s why we want to organize more company visits and other forms of cooperation in 2019.

“Previous years we have built a strong foundation and next year we are building on it! Big things are coming, let’s do this.” – Olli-Pekka Nikka, Vice-Chairman of OuluES

First national project and idea accelerator -program

One factor that will help us in 2019 is that we are part of a Ministry of Education -project that runs from 2018 to 2020. It is called Yrittäjyys ja yrittäjämäinen toiminta -project and the lead partner is Aalto University. The project has a specific project package that is shared between 10 entrepreneurship societies across Finland and we are one of them. Project’s goal is to increase the cooperation between the societies, share best practices and expand the impact of the network nationally.

Our local project goal is to develop, test and implement an early-stage idea accelerator program. We will start developing the program in the spring 2019 and we are hoping to do the first batch of the program in autumn 2019. The program will support the entrepreneurship path that we have in the universities in Oulu – from Startup Weekend and Venturing Research Challenge to Avanto Entrepreneurship program.

Master’s thesis on OuluES – wise words from former board member Niina

The impact of being involved in an entrepreneurship society has not been researched before, but now we have some information. Our formed board member, Niina Marostenmäki looked into the impact of OuluES on students. You can read the full thesis in Finnish here. It is an interesting read and the findings show that the different activities help students to develop their entrepreneurial mindset and learn skills that are needed in working life.

Get involved and make sh*t happen!

We are launching our improved student community in January and we want you to get involved in doing! Remember to subscribe to our newsletter and join as a member of the association (free of charge). This is just the start – stay tuned!

New board ready to rock!