Connecting people: The Shine! networking event brought together creators of licensable content

Last spring, Business Finland and Creative Finland co-hosted the first ever Shine! networking event at the Team Finland House in Helsinki. The event attracted a full house with 200 participants who were treated to several panel discussions regarding licensing, internationalization and new technology. 

In creative industries, licensable content is one of the most interesting areas providing significant growth potential. Cross-sector cooperation is another promising growth avenue. The purpose of the event was to create more opportunities for co-productions and for using IP in various ways and across multiple industries.

Finland is already creating world class content, but, by joining forces, we can multiply growth and find new ways to enter the international arena.

Six months later, the auditorium at the Team Finland House was packed to the rafters, brimming with faith in a brighter future. To kick the event off, Petra Tarjanne from the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment and Kaisa Rönkkö from Music x Media brought the audience up to speed on the most recent development of the Growth Deal for creative industries. After some panel discussions with well-known industry talents, came the most interesting part of the programme: 20 preselected companies pitched their business ideas to other companies. After the pitching sessions, companies and talents started networking.

“It was fantastic to see how everything just clicked! People immediately began to build new partnerships, and we can now move on to building a new, cross-sector community,” said Salli Raeste from Creative Finland.

The event was aimed at companies and professionals in the audio visual, game, XR, literature and music industries who are interested in tapping into the skills available in other sectors to create successful productions and in learning more about the growth opportunities available through licensing. Information on services and financial instruments that support cooperation, such as RRF funding, was also available. Companies that approached content licensing from five different directions were immediately able to build connections and identify genuine business potential.

It is a well-known fact that the difficulties in talent recruitment represent a great challenge and a major bottleneck to business growth and upscaling, which is why the Shine! networking event specifically sought to bring together talent from different industries. The need for talent was also expressed in the pitches: a production company was looking for writers and other content producers, an author who holds exclusive rights to their own book series was looking for a game studio to come up with an idea for a game, and a company launching a financial management system for the music industry was looking for business clients.

Business Finland and Creative Finland announced that the goal of the event was to support growth and internationalization. During the day, it became clear that to set the wheels in motion, all you need to do is get people from different companies talking. While it is not possible to patent a formula for success, it is possible to organise events and create favourable conditions for making it a little easier for everyone to discover their recipe for success.

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