WE ARE DONE WHEN:
Helsinki is the #1 place for impact entrepreneurs globally.
We believe in a thriving world – one which guarantees social foundations for all within the living means of the planet. Key to shaping this future is harnessing the entrepreneurial spirit and applying it to uncover innovative solutions in all sectors. Impact entrepreneurship is a process of measurably improving upon social, environmental or cultural conditions by turning a vision into a for-profit or non-profit venture.Don't agree with our definition? Challenge it!
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Wicked is a self-building community empowering and enabling this generation of founders and pre-founders to go and tackle wicked challenges. We believe in the power of innovation and inclusion for sustainable impact in our environmental, social and economic systems.
Primarily, our activities are directed towards potential future Founders, primarily University students and researchers. Our indirect target group includes early-stage founders, universities, Impact ecosystem players, existing programs such as incubators or accelerators, investors and potentially others.
How did Wicked get started?
Aalto University has sustainability, entrepreneurship and radical creativity as their main focuses. The University of Helsinki has promoted these topics, with emphasis on sustainability, for a long time. Even though there is some activity around the topic on campuses it is quite scattered around in different places. Even though impact entrepre- neurship is a topic and some activities exist, we couldn’t find an existing and thriving impact ecosystem or impact community in the Helsinki area. We launched Wicked’s newsletter directed to students interested in impact, which was well received. After consulting many stakeholders in the startup world and weeks of digging we came to the conclusion that there is a demand for further activities and connection points around impact. Wicked is here to unite those impact-driven people and entities.
How fo you define impact entrepreneurship?
We defne impact entrepreneurship as a process of creating measurably better social and environmental conditions by turning a vision into a scalable venture. We are basing our impact entrepreneurship definition on Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Model. We see that companies that aim to tackle either the shortfall of Social Foundation or the overshoot of Planetary Boundaries can in most cases be called Impact Ventures. We’ve also created a decision tree classifying an impact venture, which incorporates EU-taxonomy in the case of environmentally sustainable economic activities. However, at this point all ventures need to be looked at case-by-case before defining them as impact. More about this in our impact definition pdf.
What do you mean by a self-building community?
We engage our entire community in planning our weekly gathering content and agendas. If you want to bring up a topic, ask a question or present an idea, you are more than welcome to do so! Through discussion we decide what are our collaborative tasks, while we actively encourage and support individuals and groups to do their own projects.Why? Because we believe that an inclusive and diverse range of perspectives results in the best ideas, innovation and results.
Is Wicked a volunteer-led organization?
At the moment, yes. We are currently doing early fundraising in order to compensate for basic board work, which includes administrative and operational duties. Our projects will remain volunteer-led. Fundraising for projects is done on an individual basis.
Anyone is free to join our Telegram chat and Discord to get to know us and join our gatherings!
How can I, an organization, support or collaborate with Wicked?
We are always looking to collaborate with organizations If that wish to you support the Wicked mission and want to help us reach our goals, we are more than happy to collaborate. Our activities are run by volunteers. and/or with possible grants. We are open to discuss collaboration on projects, partnerships and funding opportunities.
What is Wicked trying to achieve?
Wicked is making Helsinki the #1 place for aspiring impact entrepreneurs, globally. This means that we want to contribute to making Helsinki such a vibrant, welcoming and supporting impact ecosystem, that it is the best place for one to become an impact founder. Wicked has three main goals that are:1. Increased amount of impact startups and in effect meaningful careers2. An impact community that unites the university ecosystems, Aalto University and Helsinki University as a part of a greater impact community.3. For daily discourse around entrepreneurship and startups to revolve around using entrepreneurship as a tool for tackling societal and environmental challenges.