During the week 41 of 2020, the project successfully conducted the workshop week of the Petrozavodsk autumn 2020 session. The new session differs from the previous one in many ways. First of all, for the first time in the history of the project, the session is held completely online. It means, that all students and coaches meet each other and participate in the session online. As you might remember the last session was organized in a hybrid model, when Finnish and Norwegian participants were involved in the project remotely, but students and coaches from Russian partners gathered all together in Murmansk for the workshop session. But this autumn, restrictions caused by COVID, have not allowed the project to organize any face-to-face meetings. Therefore, the positive experience of the last session gives confidence in the successful implementation of the planned activities.
Another novelty of this session is a lengthy training session, “Creative Steps” which lasted for a few weeks. “Creative Steps” is a model of an innovation workshop designed by the experts from Lapland UAS Anitra Arkko-Saukkonen and Anželika Krastina. It is a guided step by step approach, which was already successfully used in different digital cross-border collaborations. The methodology’s aim in the BRIDGE project is to help the students in an innovation process during their work on business cases.
Anitra and Anzelika with the help of external experts Matthew Lynch and Anthony Okuogume have held four training sessions, during which they guided the teams through all 10 + 1 steps of the model, giving explanation, instructions and tasks for each step.
The usefulness of the training session was already appreciated by the participants “…it helped to understand the case, what to do, in which direction to move…”, “I really liked the step-by-step system of solutions. It is easy to understand and very useful”.
Another difference between the Petrozavodsk session and the previous ones is the commissioners. Ten commissioners are represented by companies of the Karelia regions from various fields of businesses: digital marketing, production companies, hospitality, cleaning, design, international filmmaking. Most of the entrepreneurs are young people under 25 years old. In fact, three of them are the PetrSU students, who participated in the Murmansk BRIDGE-project session as team members. BRIDGE-project is for young, talented, enterprising, innovative and active students!
A huge load of work has already been done by our participants, there is an equal amount of tasks to be accomplished ahead. The teams have still almost four weeks to work on the innovation and ideation process, to develop new business ideas and solutions, which will be finally presented on 16th November.