As we wrote back in October 2019, the consulting team of Crazy Town initiated a project in Albania.
Crazy Town facilitated the first EU for Innovation hackathon in Tirana
On February 6-7, 2020, Mikko Korpela and Toni Pienonen of Crazy Town Oy facilitated the first of EU for Innovation hackathons in Albania in our mission to increase university-business-cooperation in Albania and foster new univeristy-based startups.
A total of ten university teams hacked the challenge ”How to make Tirana the European hotspot for digital nomads?”. Within two days, teams had built from the scratch a working prototype of a nomad app, several new service concepts and business ideas – and pitched them very professionally to a jury! 😍
Me and Mikko are proud of all the teams that participated. There’s plenty of talent among Albanian students that rest of the world needs to know about! Crazy Town will facilitate two more hackathons with EU for Innovation in spring 2020 in Albania.
Thanks to Universiteti Polis for hosting the hackathon, our coaches and local #EU4innovation team.
Crazy Town members visiting Albania
As the hackathon challenge goes, Tirana, the capital city of Albania, is a great destination for digital freelancers, who’d like to work from an interesting emerging location, or for startups looking a location in Europe to combine work & holiday.
Crazy Town community has an opportunity to test this in practice, as we will be sending five member companies to Tirana in spring 2020. All this is made possible by ”Startups-in-residence” program of the EU for Innovation. These members include Woolman & Jooli markkinointi & viestintä Oy from Jyväskylä, as well as Valkokettu (Fabio Glaser) from Tampere.
Finland-Albania connection
During our hackathon week, we also met with several Albanian startup entrepreneurs, whom we hope to connect to Finland, including Arlind, the co-founder of Coolab, a new coworking space in Tirana. We also had a pleasure to meet a real nomad working in Tirana, the coworking guru Ryan Chatterton, who has for example authored several articles for Coworking Insights. It was interesting to reflect our own approach to coworking in international context.
So all in all, a great week in #kovassaseurassa 🙂
– Toni / CT