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IMPULSA - Fòrum Fundació Príncep de Girona
IMPULSA - Fòrum Fundació Príncep de Girona

Think Big, Act small and Collaborate

The thinking big, acting differently and collaborating happens at the level of individuals. It does not require first a large scale change in society. But rather it is that these actions will change the society. It is definitely bottom-up. So the thought I want to leave you with is a simple formula: Dream, take action and be willing to collaborate. Great things will follow for sure.

It is curious how the environment where you grow up and where you live affects the way you become. And how it affects the society and fundamental values.


In Finland, due to hard living conditions, you have to be very good in succeeding with limited resources, planning, preparing for the future, and collaborating and keeping promises. Because, especially in the past, in these natural conditions your life and the life of others’ depended on those values of collaborating and sticking to what you promised.


So, you collaborate to survive. And I would say it’s these same values and way of operating what Europe also needs now. Incremental innovations are not sufficient for Europe.  The focus should be on strategic innovations that challenge the entire industry, worldwide.


An organization MAY have a strategy if they do different things than others OR if they do the same things differently.


Therefore, strategic innovation is something that….


-        has a big impact on the market: it changes the rules of the game of an entire industry


-        it matters to customers (because it addresses their needs better)


-        It can be achieved only by acting differently from everyone else


 


Creating strategic innovations requires three central things:


 


1) raising the quality of ideas (thinking bigger, dreaming, we even do dream audits with companies to ensure their goals are ambitious enough)


2) lowering the threshold of experimenting (although you think big, the key is to act small, to put ideas to test and to do early experiments)


3) and doing all this together with others (collaborating). They are too complex to be done alone.


The key point here is the combination of thinking big, acting small and doing it together.


And taking action is crucial. You have to first ACT differently to be able to think differently.  Because when you are creating something truly novel – as is the case in strategic innovations - you cannot go forward by just planning because you do not have the information on which you could base your plans. It has not been done yet.


So, you have to create that information through experimenting with your idea. You have to try it out. And see what works and what doesn’t. Which also requires you to be prepared to be wrong, and fail, and learn from that.


Aalto University itself was formed in 2010 by bringing together three Finnish universities: the leading universities of technology, design, and economics. The aim of Aalto is to train its students into skilled professionals that master the art of collaborating across different disciplines – and having an entrepreneurial mindset.


So, it is a physical as well as mental environment designed for


-        supporting interdisciplinary collaboration


-        problem-based learning and


-        building prototypes and doing experiments.


 


The key at facilitating collaboration and experimentation at Design Factory is to


-        keep things quite informal and relaxed


-        avoid hierarchies and bureaucracy,


-        and to communicate that failures are unavoidable and necessary for learning – they are even desirable.


 


The most important part of creating an environment that invites to collaborate and to experiment with your idea, is that it is open, equal and based on trust. If you demonstrate trust, you will also receive trust and responsible behavior.


 


Training students to collaborate, to trust in their capabilities and let them learn how to put ideas into action is a really empowering combination. Students do not want to just talk about their ideas, they want to make them happen. And that is powerful.


 


But of course dreaming alone doesn’t create change. It needs moving those dreams into reality through experiments. Experience shows, that sometimes people need to be encouraged to act differently, in a sense, given a permission to have this attitude. James Bond has his own kind of a license, but we have issued another license – one that is a license to act differently.


 


This license is based on the idea that our work practices and our private lives are full of conventions that we have accepted, even if we do not like them, and they can limit our creativity and our ability to do things. So this license gives people the permission to do things out of the ordinary to change the course of things when they feel it’s necessary in order to create something new.


 


So we issue Licenses to people to encourage acting differently. And our current agent network consists of nearly two thousand people around the world – including students, politicians, professors and even the former Finnish president.


 


And now to spread the network also in Spain, I would like to invite Prince Felipe and Princess Letizia to this network of people with a license to act differently. I can’t promise that it will not give any superpowers, but it can work as an encouragement to use the powers you already have.


The thinking big that I spoke about, acting differently and collaboration happens at the level of individuals. It does not require first a large scale change in society. But rather it is that these actions will change the society. It is definitely bottom-up. So the thought I want to leave you with is a simple formula:  Dream, take action and be willing to collaborate. Great things will follow for sure.

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