Artistic, creative, and community-building activities

2024- ongoing. Founder of Mietekeskus. The novel concept aims to blend science and arts in festival settings for bringing science closer to the public and giving scholars a platform to share knowledge outside academia. Concept was launched at Mitäs Mitäs festival, speakers included some of well known Finnish academics and a wide range of professional artists whose art was blended to the lectures. Concept details and team info: https://mitasmitasmitas.fi/ohjelma/mitas-mietekeskus/

2018-ongoing. Founder Burning Stories scienceart collective (https://www.burning-stories.com/), a science-art platform studying the growing global influence of participatory culture art communities, spanning from annual Burning Man festival in Nevada festival to Chaos Computing Club´s techart-infused summits in Germany. The experimental research 1) investigates via collected transformative narratives (n=350) how community membership affects identities, and 2) studies the use of scienceart data collection devices and 3) explores ways to disseminate data via arts.

2017-2020. Co-founder and the lead of Startup Circus event concept, which combined a wide range of arts to a traditional pitching competition format. The community-driven artistic early stage startup event featured the best student teams from the institutional entrepreneurial educators of Aalto BIZ, Aalto AVP, Haaga-Helia, The Shortcut and Helsinki Business College. The concept crew to a small community, whose mission was to induce Helsinki´s startup ecosystem with a variety of arts with regular side events. Although the concept under Creative Commons licence was put on hold during pandemic, it is fully ready for a possible future implementation.

2018-2020. Co-founder of WTSUP! Beirut, an initiative that focused on transferring values of equality from the Nordics to the Middle East via entrepreneurship education. The main event was during 02/2019, in a partnership with the Finnish Foreign Ministry. Outcomes include a Nordic-Lebanon community of volunteer expert entrepreneurs, a few media outputs in YLE, and a co-authored article contributing to the understanding of how to enable joint action of heterogeneous stakeholders in an impact-driven project, published in Research in the Sociology of Organizations. I led the project from 2017 until 2020, and it was terminated as a result of Beirut´s 2020 explosion.

2016-2017. Founder of Pyongyang Startup Week 1 & 2.. PSW was the first ever startup event in North Korea. The purpose was (a) to enable science diplomacy under dire political situations, (b) pilot Finnish education in extreme settings, (c) for offering new, more democratic, business education concepts. There is no plan to engage with North Korea until the political situation gets considerably better. The main outcomes from the whole project that I led during from 2013 to 2017 have been published in the Academy of Management Discoveries. and Environment & Planning A.