Making strategy in the flow of Pöhinä

Abstract

Dear reader, please watch the videographic counterpart of this study, labeled with the same name: Making strategy in the flow of Pöhinä – Videographic encounters with the Helsinki start-up scene. This output will be available in the Vimeo web-service and can be searched with its title. In case of changes in the Vimeo service, the video will be made available elsewhere and will be searchable using any internet search engine. This paper and the corresponding video are both valid in itself as an academic study to read or view as they stand, but to truly understand the phenomena, it is strongly advised to watch and read both of them. For the ones who watched the video and seek an empiric written theorization of the phenomena, this is the right study to read.

This study is about the people and the affective ways of doing strategy in the Helsinki start-up eco-system of Maria01. It aims to provide an interesting glimpse to the subjective processes which are used to implement and design working strategies in these starting companies and to present the scene they operate. The phenomena of strategy-making will be contextualized by theories first de-scribing the entrepreneurs who make it themselves. After this, how the strategy is being made will be described on the prior studies of affectivity and performativity, binding these to the concept of effectuation. This will give us a coherent concept to describe the strategy making happening.

The phenomena is studied by three in-depth interviews of three young successful start-up CEO’s. The interviews are not only analyzed following the tradition of interpretive consumer research and delivered in text to the reader, but are filmed and edited to an expressive form, to deliver the reader a videographic performance and experience of the phenomena. With this research, I am to analyze whether the universal traits of entrepreneurship, leadership and strategy-making still stand in the very contemporary and young start-ups of the Maria01 start-up incubator in Helsinki, the so-called “Pöhinä”-scene, and what forces affect them. This research also serves as a contribution to the vid-eography academia and is one of the first ones to investigate strategy as a phenomena through this method.