A privately-funded innovation hub with four locations in Finland, Crazy Town builds entrepreneurial coworking communities that collaborate with universities and hosts training programs and innovative projects. Each of Crazy Town’s locations bring together solopreneurs, micro-sized companies, startups and teams from larger organizations who want to co-operate, learn and grow their business together.
Crazy Town focuses on three elements in its activities: culture, community managers and space.
Culture: Crazy Town builds and nurtures a culture that encourages interaction between people, who either work within or visit the Crazy Town community. Crazy Town focuses on people, not organizations, and participants are always seen as individuals.
Community managers: Crazy Town manages communities. The main job of the staff is to facilitate interaction between members of the community, as well as visitors and partners. Connecting needs and services together often requires a person whom you know and trust.
Space: Crazy Town has a physical environment designed to facilitate collaboration and networking between people. All locations have flexible space for workshops and bigger events. In the daily life of Crazy Town, hundreds of experts share knowledge and lessons learned and Crazy Town co-leaders create the conditions for members to learn together.
Crazy Town has experience in curriculum development and delivery, which stands it in good stead to work in the REVALORISE+ project team. In concept development, Crazy Town utilizes its experience and best practices of design and delivery of hackathons and other co-creation events, such as idea and challenge campaigns, as practical tools to boost research valorisation and how to involve stakeholders and societal actors. Crazy Town also makes use of its experience from impact training for researchers and staff members.
In addition to this, Crazy Town organizes events and training on various themes. Most of these are open to everyone. On their website you will find events, as well as coaching programs that you can participate in even if you are not a member. All these examples have one thing in common – they happened because Crazy Town’s counterparts in the universities were open to new ideas but could also connect with relevant resources and thus deliver quality outputs. With the help of the REVALORISE+ project, Crazy Town hopes to increase valorisation capabilities throughout Finland and Europe. In terms of project responsibilities, Crazy Town is the leader of the Pilot Test phase of the training, will coordinate the activity, ensure that trainers, coaches and mentors are prepared for the task ahead, and offer necessary onsite support. Crazy Town hope to focus on people, learning-by- doing and peer-to-peer learning, as (i) the European SSH Valorisation Training Programme for KT/TT professionals and (ii) The HackTheResearch Valorisation Training Programme for researchers are pilot-tested across Europe.
