By Anne Pakari
What would be better than having a magic wand, whereby you could make your wildest dreams come true? Inspired by Harry Potter Legos, we have recently experienced 3D printer being busy printing magic wands at home – reminding us about the endless opportunities that we were able to see as children.
Do you have big dreams? Are you ready to fight to make them true? As adults, we often see more constrains than possibilities. This limits our thinking and ability to see the opportunities for brand new solutions. For a child instead, there is no notion of limitations, nor impossible, that would prevent one to try, explore and learn. For most adults, one plus one is two, or at maximum 'win-win' bringing a little bit more than two. When discussing with my child however, one plus one can be seen as eleven! What an exponential difference in the way we can see the world around us!
Imagine, that we would also in business continue to believe in miracles and actively listen to these unspoiled minds trusting in endless possibilities. What a huge difference could that make into finding new paths and ideas for improvement.
Are you already thinking why that is not possible? Finding excuses?
Have you ever thought about building a bridge to students that could bring back some of this young spirit?
Up in the north, we have! Our agile corporate and public sector ecosystem players just decided to engage with students together. We stepped up to pilot a new educational ecosystem initiative from Finland called Start North. In their 10 days 100 challenges program pilot it was super easy to engage with young innovative people.
Several real-life Summer Challenges were launched for students via the Open Ecosystem Network, such as 5G for Sports, IoT for waste and resource efficiency, and Assisted Living. Start North partners invited students from different educational institutes that offer them study points for working on the Summer Challenges with organized coaching, training, lunch and BBQs - a summer camp, where one can both learn, network and have fun. Amazing diverse teams of young talents self-organized themselves into teams, each working on a challenge that inspired them and magic started to happen. Pitches of the solutions to the Challenges showed true out of the box thinking, that the companies said not to have thought about themselves and it was amazing to see how much a brand new team is able to create in only 10 days.
Let's see, if the next steps will make us believe in miracles again!