Metropolia Minno® course: a gateway to Finnish work culture

Many times, people focus a lot of their time crafting the business idea. Sometimes people can spend too much time on the logo and the branding of the company as a distraction from the real work of building a business. One of the things that happens quite a lot is that people forget to work on how they will tell people about their idea (or concept or business). What is a Pitch? Pitching is a form of public speaking. A person can pitch to an individual, a small group or to a giant audience. It is a form of condensed public speaking where you are expected to convey your message in a soundbite lasting from the 30-seconds Elevator pitch through to the longer form pitch that is 6+ minutes. The pitch itself is a combination of marketing and personal performance. When Do We Need Pitching? Pitching is needed in many more places than you think. Pitching is done by entrepreneurs and by employees alike. This means that pitching can happen to internal audiences and to external audiences. For the most part, pitching is mainly seen as an external activity but when we approach colleagues and bosses about new ideas, new industries, or new potential markets, we are also pitching to them. Pitching Internally Good employees are usually looking for ideas to help their company improve; to become more profitable, more sustainable, more efficient, more impactful, etc. They may have initial ideas of how this can be done but if you want others to buy-in to your idea, you need to do your research and have a solid plan in place to make it happen. You will need to figure out which departments and which personnel should be involved, how many hours it will take, what the cost structure is, what the business model should be, etc. This requires a lot of people to buy-in to your idea. Pitching your idea to all levels involved is usually necessary. This isn’t even necessarily limited to your professional life. If you want your family to go on a certain holiday or buy a certain car, you may be motivated enough to figure out how to pitch them these ideas to be successful. Daniel Pink discusses pitching using anecdotes, studies, and insights in his 2013 book To Sell Is Human. He explores how we are all ‘working in sales’ in every part of our lives. He also has some useful templates for creating different kinds of pitches. Pitching Externally Many people are also pitching externally. Most notably, we see entrepreneurs and soon-to-be entrepreneurs as the quintessential pitchers. Entrepreneurs are pitching to investors to get funding or mentorship, to individuals to attract employees, or when they are looking for a co-founder. Sales people and company leaders are also engaged in external pitching on a daily basis. Essentially, you need to make your offer interesting enough for someone not connected to your company to give you money, access, or influence. Pitching is an often-overlooked skill at any level of an organsation. 4 Key Ingredients for Successful Pitching So what are the elements that will help your pitch go smoothly and set you up for success? 1)    Knowing Your Idea Inside and Out You should be able to tell someone the real problem that you are solving almost in one line. This deep understanding comes from the customer research that you have done. Although you will not include all the information directly into your pitch, you will know, from the customer’s perspective, what problem they are having, how they are currently solving it, and what is most important to them. In addition to this, you will also understand how your specific solution will solve their specific problem and why they would choose your product over someone else’s. You will have also tested the idea through customer interviews and/or prototyping. You should know the problem, the solution, the customer, the market and how you fit in it inside out. 2)    An Impactful Story Doing good initial customer research allows you tap into the struggles that people are facing. These struggles will allow you to humanise the impact your solution will have on their lives; whether this is saving them money, time, mental stress, or something else. From this you can craft an impactful story to tell to the listener. A great example of this is the micro-finance organisation Kiva. Their co-founder, Jessica Jackley, has spoken many times about the importance of an impactful story on different aspects of the organisation. She can be heard speaking about this topic on the Inside Influence podcast in episode 123. 3)    The Pitch Deck When doing a 30-second pitch (a.k.a the elevator pitch), you will never have any “supporting materials” such as a slide deck (a PowerPoint presentation or the like). If it is from 2 mins onwards, your will probably have the opportunity to use a slide deck. The less time you have, the more concise you will need to be with your slides. The slides should not be stuffed full of content but have very little (but relevant) text and/or visuals. For a balanced pitch, you need to have at least these 8 slides: Problem - explains clearly the problem you are solving Solution - shows how you plan to solve it Value proposition - tells why customers would choose you to solve their problem Business model - examines how your business plans to make money Landscape - recognises your competition with and that you understand the market Team - represents who builds this with you Current & future status - chronicles your process of discovery and what you plan to do next Ask/call to action - describes what you need next from the audience Once you have slides that are clear, visually appealing, and informative, you will begin to work on your pitch script and delivery. 4)    Delivering The Pitch The actual delivery of the pitch can be divided into two parts: the creation of the pitch script (what you will say) and your stage presence (what you do with your hands, your voice projections, etc). Both parts are essential to practice. The Pitch Script The very first time you create the words that you want to use, you can either just talk and see how long it takes and then begin to refine it from there, or you can create a written script for each of the slides and then see how long it takes to get through this. You can record (or not) this first attempt. You can see where you stumble, where the words don’t seem to work or where you are spending too much time. Each time you go through your pitch, refine the words, maybe even what is on the slide. If it is taking too long, you will need to think about how you might say it more briefly. You can also make very brief notes for each slide with key words to help in case you stumble or go blank. You may also want to craft some answers to follow-up questions that you have not addressed in your slides in case they are asked. The Pitch Delivery The delivery is the public speaking portion of the pitch. Public speaking (even if it is just to one person) is a skill that needs practicing. How your pitch is received will be down to how much you practice. Actors in a play do not get up on stage the first day that they get the script, they generally practice for weeks before they are required to perform for an audience. Your pitch delivery, make no mistake, is a performance. Luckily, it is a short one. But it still requires you to practice. You need to make sure that: You can do it in the time allotted You can do it in a smooth manner You are clear Your voice is appropriately loud (find out if you will get a microphone or not) You can give it without looking directly at your slides Don’t turn your back to the audience You cover all the necessary points Practice, Practice, Practice Practicing with a stopwatch and a camera will help you to see where you need improvement. These might be where you put your hands, how much hand movement you have, where your words are not clear, where you are not changing the slides to keep up with your talking, etc. Sometimes, with so little time, you need to speed up the way you speak and this can be difficult for some. But you also need to make sure that you are not speaking too quickly that you are hard to understand. The tendency to rush when we are speaking to an audience is real and to control this, it is best to make sure that when you are pitching, it isn’t the first time you are doing it. It is also important to practice doing all of this with your slides. This adds another level of complexity to the whole operation. Making sure that you are changing your slides at the appropriate times when you are talking in front of an audience, is just as important to practice as the speaking. Pitching ideas, whether internally or externally, can be difficult and people will ask you questions that you either didn’t anticipate about or do not have immediate answers for. This is normal. You can try to anticipate what these might be by watching other pitching events and see what information they present and seeing what questions they are asked. This will help you to shape your answers or even change what you present in the first place. Author Pamela Spokes works as a Service Designer in Metropolia’s RDI team. Originally from Canada, Pamela has years of experience in university admin focusing on international recruitment, marketing, and the international student/staff experience. With a Bachelor’s from Canada, a Master’s degree from Sweden, an MBA in Service Innovation & Design from Laurea, and her AmO from Haaga-Helia, she is interested in purposefully designed experiences that are centred around the user. Don’t be surprised if she knocks on your door to talk about learning co-creation methods through intensive learning experiences.

One of the most rewarding parts of my work is facilitating change. Especially mindset change in individuals. This can come in many forms and the one that I think is the best is in more intensive learning experiences such as innovation challenges. Learning what is possible in a short amount of time can be a real mindset shift for many people. This mindset shift is what is needed in almost every business and organisation today to move away from older, more traditional methods of development where it can take months or even a year to develop products or services. Every Organisation Needs Adaptability It isn’t that the older way of doing things is necessarily all bad. But the world moves at such a pace now, that having speedier tools that can be deployed, when necessary, will give individuals and their organisations an advantage. This agility and adaptability allow people to think in more diverse ways, include people they may not have done previously, and give them tools to try new ways in a more simple and straightforward way. Facilitating Change Mindset The first thing that is required by everyone involved in any of these intensive learning events is an open mind that is willing to look beyond the regular boundaries for what is possible. Open to developing a mindset that includes things like: valuing and enhancing creativity increased tolerance towards ambiguity a higher willingness to take risks being intrinsically motivated through curiosity and, very importantly, a willingness to accept failure as not only a valid outcome but viewing it as a learning experience. During the event, the participants will be practicing and enhancing these different mindset skills as well as learning new tools and methods for problem-solving. In essence, they will be reinforcing the new mindset by learning tools and methods that reinforce their use in the future. The mindset described above is often referred to as the Entrepreneurial Mindset. Learning By Doing Learning by doing is used in many institutions. It is an “active learning methodology based on experience to assimilate concepts through actions.” (1) This methodology is used slightly differently in different places, but it is not new at all. When you look way back into education and history, you can read that as early as 4th century, Aristotle says in Nicomachean Ethics Book 2 “We learn an art or craft by doing the things that we shall have to do when we have learnt it” [often quoted as ‘What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing’]. (2) The objective of this learning by doing method is to build fundamental memories of how to do something. To avoid the natural forgetting that often happens when we only hear or read about how to do something. Using the learning by doing method, the participant internalises the concept more deeply when it is an experience rather than just a mental memory. Intense Learning Experiences: Sprints, Jams, and Hackathons With this learning by doing method in mind, intense learning experiences are important framework for quickly embedding new methods and mindsets into participants. This framework is both flexible and modern. Intense learning experiences are when groups of participants come together for a limited amount of time. Ideally this timeframe would be 2-10 days but can be just one day for a very short learning experience. This experience will be simultaneously rigorously scheduled while the progress and content are ambiguous. Participants work in teams with a challenge that has been either provided by the trainer or an organisational partner. The process that everyone uses is standardised - like the service design methodology. This allows for everyone to follow the process and understand what is expected of them in the present and what will come next. A shared process creates a clarity in the face of the ambiguous (and ambitious) task at hand. It is important to make sure each participant of a group knows what is happening and to be able to contribute appropriately. This also allows any organisational partners to feel secure that their time is not being wasted and that it is not too chaotic to follow the progress of the team. All the while, the participants are learning and using a reusable set of methods that they can apply elsewhere once the event is over. The teacher also has a framework for which to base learning progress and assessment on if assessment is part of the learning journey of the participants. There are many different types of innovation challenges, three of them are more fully explained in previous blog posts: Service jams, Hackathons, and Design sprints. Each of which are for a different purpose. Skills practiced and developed The skills that are developed during an intense include: the process that is being used (design thinking, design sprint, etc) teamwork skills tolerating ambiguity/uncertainty taking learnings from failures being user-centric user/customer research methods ideation creating concepts from individual ideas prototyping & testing concepts knowing where to spend time and where to speed up There are certainly more that will come from this kind of event, it really depends on the individuals. The last bullet point is illustrated better in another blog article called Slowing Down to Speed Up – From First Idea to Prototype. Sprinting skills can be really helpful to move a project forward much more quickly than previously attempted. These skills are useful for most people in most jobs. Change is hard but having an agreed upon method is already an important step. Having this will help many people to move projects along faster than usual. This can help organisations succeed faster but also to move on from failures faster. Both of these save staff time and the organisation’s financial resources. Author Pamela Spokes works as a Service Designer in Metropolia’s RDI team. Originally from Canada, Pamela has years of experience in university admin focusing on international recruitment, marketing, and the international student/staff experience. With a Bachelor’s from Canada, a Master’s degree from Sweden, an MBA in Service Innovation & Design from Laurea, and her AmO from Haaga-Helia, she is interested in purposefully designed experiences that are centred around the user. Don’t be surprised if she knocks on your door to talk about learning co-creation methods through intensive learning experiences. Resources Learning by doing: what is it and what is its methodology? (smowl.net) Oxford Essential Quotations (5 ed.) Aristotle 384–322 BC, Greek philosopher. (oxfordreference.com)

The Entrepreneurial Mindset is important to foster for all kinds of reasons. Whether you are planning to become and entrepreneur or not. That is because an Entrepreneurial Mindset is a set of definable, specific skills. In 2017, Finland’s Ministry of Education and Culture defined entrepreneurial education as “... a set of skills that enable people to identify and make the most of opportunities, overcome and learn from setbacks, and succeed in a variety of settings.” (1) This sets the foundation for defining the entrepreneurial mindset that they want to build from basic education to higher education. Through further research, we have broken this down into 9 learnable skills at Metropolia. Entrepreneurial Mindset at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences [caption id="attachment_12104" align="alignnone" width="620"] Image 1. 9 fundamentals of the entreprenurial mindset[/caption] At Metropolia, we have defined these 9 skills as: Ability to innovate Creativity Proactiveness Teamwork Tolerance to risk-taking Tolerance of failure Plan & reach objectives Problem-centred Networking Each of these skills is important in their own right to build a well-rounded mindset for moving forward in the 21st century. This is part of lifelong learning and continual improvement. In this post, we are looking more deeply into is CREATIVITY. Creativity as a Practicable Skill Creativity is something that has propelled the human race forward for hundreds of thousands of years and it is essential to fostering an entrepreneurial mindset. When you search Google, you get the dictionary definition creativity is “...the use of imagination or original ideas to create something; inventiveness...” [caption id="attachment_12102" align="alignnone" width="620"] Image 2. Definition of creativity.[/caption] What can be surprising to many people is that there is nothing about art or drawing or even physical abilities of any kind. It only refers to your brain. It is about how you think about things, how you apply knowledge and insights, and how you make connections. As a concept, creativity is really made up of multiple skills in itself. Problem-solving Artistic expression Innovation Critical Thinking Imagination and Exploration Collaboration Adaptability Looking at this list, you can see that artistic expression is listed as one of the seven skills of creativity. It is there as one way to be creative but it is just one way. It is a very visual and sometimes visceral way of showing creativity and that is why it gets so much attention. It is easy to point out and to share but that does not mean that it is the only way; it is just the most obvious. When looking at how to use creativity and to practice creativity in the world of work, it requires something from the individual and something from the organisation where that person works. Open Minds and Being Wrong From the individual, exercising creativity require you at the very least to have an open mind (willing have and receive ideas from others) and a willingness to be wrong. Fundamentally understanding that you can and will sometimes be wrong can be difficult for many people. Being open and happy to be wrong is even a step further. This requires and acceptance of ambiguity or uncertainty. This is difficult for humans as a whole. Research shows that people would rather guarantee a bad experience than an uncertain one. Another way of saying that is that people would rather guarantee badness (2) than to have the uncertainty that the outcome may be good. Acceptance of Failure as Learning From an Organisation, being able to exercise creativity in their work, people must fee free to fail. Organisations need to cultivate a culture that accepts that failure as learning but also funds failure as a valid outcome. Daring greatly and creating a safe space for experimentation is not cheap either emotionally or financially for an organisation. But the rewards of success can be great. Having an engaged and interested workforce is not very common according to multiple Gallup polls over the past several years. But one great side effect of being able to use creativity on work is that it fosters engagement and a sense of worth. Creativity Can Be Practiced Many people say that if you are trying something new, then you are practicing creativity. That can be anything: playing an instrument, reading a book that is out of your normal genre, learning about a new topic, visiting places you have never been before, etc. But the first step is to really believe that creativity may look different than what you have allowed yourself to believe. So, change your mindset. It is also important to understand that creativity is a tool for mental well-being as much as innovation. According to research conducted in 2016, practicing creativity can improve your mood for up to 24 hours. When you orient yourself to focus on enjoyment not success, that is when you get the most benefits from using creativity. Which means it doesn’t matter how well your activity turns out, it is doing it and enjoying the process and not determining success from the outcome. It is time to start asking yourself how you can begin to practice creativity in your life to begin to reap the benefits. Also asking yourself what creative things have you been putting off until you could be more successful at them? Success in these endeavours is not the goal, enjoying the process is. Rest as a Necessity for Creativity One of the most important things that you can ever do for your creative muscles is to rest. Now this doesn’t mean sleep, although it could definitely include sleep. It means being in a state of non-distraction. No phones, tablets, TV, etc. Rest should also incorporate walking outside…or at least being outside. No podcast, no audiobook, just outside. Spending time with friends is also considered rest. So, your friend could join you for a walk or you could chat over tea. This offline connection is so important to humans that it is actually restorative. This rested state is a much better place in which to be creative. This blog post has been adapted from a presentation given during the Turbiini Lunch and Learn Series where they explored Creativity which is one of the 9 skills of the Entrepreneurial Mindset. Author Pamela Spokes works as a Service Designer in Metropolia’s RDI team. Originally from Canada, Pamela has years of experience in university admin focusing on international recruitment, marketing, and the international student/staff experience. She is interested in purposefully designed experiences that are centred around the user. References Potinkara H. (2018) Dare to be enthusiastic! Teacher´s guide to entrepreneurial skills. Published by the Finnish Federation of Finnish Enterprises. (PDF) Small, A., & Schmutte, K. (2022). Navigating ambiguity: creating opportunity in a world of unknowns. Ten Speed Press. Resources Guidelines for entrepreneurship education 2009 (valtioneuvosto.fi) Entrepreneurship for Education Guidelines 2017 (PDF) How To Encourage And Reward Creativity In The Workplace (personatalent.com) The Connection Between Creativity and Mental Well Being (swifttech.com) Creativity in the Workplace: How to bolster engagement and productivity at work (thedesicionlab.com) Conner, T. Everyday creative activity as a path to flourishing (The Journal of Positive Psychology) Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2022 Report (gallup.com)