Challenge Turku 2018 Offered Fresh Business Ideas to Local Film Theatre
Challenge Turku is a 24 hour innovation camp organised by Brahea Centre in collaboration with the City of Turku on a yearly basis since 2013. Participants can join from all higher education institutions in Turku and work in multidisciplinary teams to find innovative ways to solve a given challenge focused on areal development work in the Turku region.
Student mentor Mac Nguyen, student participants Thuy Nguyen, Taisia Sycheva, Ngan Dao and Project Coordinator Heli Brander.
Innovation camp Challenge Turku kicked off for the sixth time on the 4 May 2018. This year’s camp was organised in co-operation with film theatre Kino Diana, owned by Cinemahouse Oy. The challenge was to boost Kino Diana’s service business with students as the target group.
Many of the innovations focused on improving the service business of Kino Diana for international students. The participants saw the theatre as a great potential place to meet locals and learn about the Finnish culture and language. In addition to coming up with fresh new ideas for the theatre to apply in the long run, the participants designed and executed a special event based on their initial innovations. A combination of the team’s ideas turned into Student night with Deadpool, a late-evening screening of Deadpool 2 on May 22 tailored for the student community of Turku.
Participants of the challenge were not required to have any prior experience of business or marketing skills - an interest in teamwork, innovation and learning new things was enough.
– We needed to create content marketing and promotion via social media, and that was actually not an easy task when your post will be published on an official social media page, says Turku University of Applied Sciences student Ngan Dao.
Camp leader Heli Brander from Brahea Centre of the University of Turku held coaching sessions to the participants on service business and development as well as social media marketing to support the innovation process.
– What I learnt about the most during the camp was practical skills: sales, digital marketing, marketing strategies and understanding customers’ feelings, notes Turku University of Applied Sciences student Thuy Nguyen.
The 24 hours of the camp were divided into multiple parts during May, of which 10 hours were allocated for the designing and promoting of the event on May 22.
– The event was really successful. The whole gang including the team, our student mentor Mac Nguyen and Kino Diana Staff worked so well together that it was pure joy to be a part of this, praises camp leader Brander.
The challenge participants echo Brander’s sentiment about good teamwork and the excellent atmosphere of the camp.
– This was my first time being involved in creating a marketing campaign and it was so exciting to get to see what we made. I would have never guessed so many people not affiliated with us would come to the event, says Åbo Akademi University student Taisia Sycheva.
Text and photo: Ellinoora Havaste