Here’s Mikko. He is 55 years old and just got fired from Nokia Here’s Mikko. He is 55 years old and just got fired from Nokia. He was a Sales Manager, with a 20-year background in product development. Now he’s thinking what to do next, because he is too young to retire.

And, Mikko is not alone, during 2011-2012 Nokia fired almost 6000 employees. And many other companies followed suit. Finland can’t afford to lose the labor input of these 10 000’s of experienced, unemployed people. But government has run out of ideas on how to solve this problem.

Here is a startup called Rubix Here is a startup called Rubix. It was formed by enthusiastic engineering students, who work on a smart automobile product. It is a great idea and they have technical know-how, but they are having difficulties with their go-to-market strategy.

Kasper Suomalainen CMO @ Startup Sauna This problem is common for startups. Kasper from Startup Sauna said to us that the lack of business experience is a major factor in failed startups. Many know how to build a product, but few know how to build the business around it.

Aalto Experience Society Experience matters! This is where our idea, the Aalto Experience Society comes to play. We combine experienced people like Mikko, the ex-Nokia employee, with startups like Rubix and make everyone happy and successful.

How do we actually solve the problem part 1 Build an organisation to connect these people Finding the old people. Aalto AlumniNET, Associations (TEK etc.) or the government (TE-toimisto). The first spend a lot of money to pay for unemployed memebers and thus have an interest in getting these people jobs. TE-toimisto in funded by government, who pays the unemployment benefits. So also they have a huge interest in finding jobs for these people. After we have old poeple, they have own personal networks that will bring more old people (Markuses dad’s point that a personalized email and appreciation for your expertise will be more convincing for the old guy than just an advert or mass- email) How do we combine these? We create an experience pool of motivated individuals. Their qualities, such as experience, skills and aspirations, are carefully screened and will be used later on for superb match making between the startups and experienced people.

The first way how we’re utilizing our experience pool is by organizing networking events, such as “speed dating”, to enhance matchmaking between budding startups and experienced people. We also encourage these motivated individuals to spend time at places like Design Factory and Startup Sauna to network with young entrepreneurs.

How do we actually solve the problem part 2 We have two ways in which we can help interested old people. 1)We take them to Aalto’s entrepreneurship courses to do the ideation with/among students 2) We take them to our networking events and encourage them to go to Aaltoes events to meet student groups that already have ideas and are missing specific expertise or vision What do we do on those courses? Which courses Entrepreneurial experience (organised by AVP) -PDP Venture ideation Secondly, we integrate experienced people into Aalto courses, such as PDP, Venture Ideation and Entrepreneurial Experience. There they get to know students closely as their team members, not just as an advisor like in some mentoring programs.

So what happens after these people team up So what happens after these people team up? We highly encourage them to take part in events like Summer of Startups to accelerate the ideas further with support from Aalto startup ecosystem.

To make all this possible, the Aalto Experience Society will not charge anything from the startups. Instead, our organization will be funded by government, for example Tekes. We will later have co-operation with companies and partnerships with other stakeholders. We will also investigate the opportunity to take the good practices of our organization to other universities.

Aalto University School of Business To verify our idea, we talked to an ex-Nokia employee and these two guys who all think that our idea is great. Mr. Miettinen from Aaltoes would warmly welcome more experienced people to the Aaltoes community. And Mr. Kibler said that “Having an experienced old guy join and commit to the team can make huge difference.” He even suggested that we could test this idea on the Venture Ideation course that will be organized again next year. Jesse Miettinen Vice President Aaltoes Ewald Kibler Director of the Master Program in Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management Aalto University School of Business

You might wonder, aren’t Aalto AlumniNET and the mentoring program of Aalto already doing this? They do plenty of fancy dinners, but what they lack are opportunities to mingle with students and experience the Aalto startup scene more closely.

With us, not disconnecting, but…

Aalto Experience Society RE …reconnecting experienced, unemployed people with enthusiastic aspiring entrepreneurs, we will give meaningful work to the motivated individuals, thus helping the startups become successful companies.