We wanna share with you our great memories from Iceland. Here is a video from the Lava09 NPP annual conference.

It was nice to meet you all! You are always welcome to our yellow office in here Jyväskylä, Finland.

Thank you for the journey!

Tatu and the Naked Ape

And here’s the motorola by Johanna about journey and works in Iceland!

Hey, here is for you mine post-motorola about Lava. I wanna share it with you fellows.

1. What went well?
- We had a chance to do co-creating together and a chance to get know each other at good way -working together.
- We had there a great punch of people, all different, different ages and different countries, different skills and knowledges.
- I was really excited about our task and it was great to work with a new people from different backgrounds.
- Everybody was really involved in our process.
- That time together was really important to us, Monkeys. We got new ideas and we got a lot of inspiration.
- It was great to met Juha-Matti, who has drawn our super monkey and also Tupsu-cartoons.
- It was great to spend time with Nic, because I didin´t know him before so well.
- Iceland was an awesome place, I have always wanted to travel in there.
- We were sleeping last two days in a home of one local family. It was really nice and we got touch the country whole different way.
- We met one Finish girl who study in Iceland and she told to us plenty stories about Iceland and Grönland.
- We spend too much cash – we bought and ate too much of banana candies, so we didin´t have enough money to go back to our Icelandic home by bus. So we had to hick-hike. It was new experience to me. And one new banana story to tell.
- We were in a great jazz bar, where was going on some great jazz jams.

2. What went poorly?
- We didin´t have time to close our process together. So I´m not sure of that did everybody understand the hole process and what happened and why.
- We didn´t have so much free time over there so we couldn´t go far away from Reykjavik. We need to go again over there.
- We had only short time to be House of Ideas, Design Central and other places.

3. What did I learn?
- I learn to know new peoples and working with them.
- Creative chaos is a good thing, you just have to know how to lead that.
- Be brave to challenge of process.
- It´s hard to get of the box what you have.
- To courageous of your heart it´s working.
- If you have too much of negative pressure, it locks you up.
- I learn more about my self and Monkeys.

4. What I gonna do next?
- I want to be in contact all those new people who I met in there and maybe we can do something together for future also.
- I wanna go sometimes back in there and maybe surf there.
- I got many of new handcraft ideas.
- I send post-motorola for everyone.

So here is something what I´m thinking of this process. It would be nice to here something for all of you also.
I hope we can see each others sometimes again. You are heartly welcome to Finland and visiting to us.

Have a great time and keep it yellow!

Loads of fun and huge hugs!
Johanna

Ps. We have Nathaniel from Kaospilots visiting us yestarday and today. We are about to cook something cool together!

In the end, we were the work with the Northern Periphery (EU)-Projects, among which is NoCry that invited us there. They were our customers. We didn’t get to work directly with Icelandic industries as we had hoped for so for me personally it took a little time to motivate myself to work with the EU-projects. But I think we got out quite a good result in the end.

The LAVA09 was a 1.5-day seminar where people from different projects met. The Young Creative Entrepreneurs had initially a one hour slot in the program as the last thing between 5 and 6 pm. Well, the previous content ran overtime and then there was a coffee break so we had to distinguish our presentations (and drop one out) down to about 30 minutes. But I think it was a success nevertheless! So what happened during that 30-40 minutes?

1. Tatu jumps on the stage – he was kind of leader of the whole process and facilitated our part of the program. He said very few words and then the lights went off and Rasmus played some loops and music based on sounds he had recorded while in Iceland. He’s a sound architect. After that Elina started improvise with piano and sang a song she had written. I heard one of the participants say that his skin was on “chicken skin” when he listened to that. It was definitely touching.
2. Tatu asked people to shake hands and say hello to people next to them. I was watching this aside and realized the real systems intelligence behind that. Loads of positive energy was flying around from people and we could feel how they got even more excited about what’s coming up.
3. Daniel of Grus jumped on stage with his presentation about Social Media. He made a quick prototype of targeted ad on Facebook and also for Google Ads. One of his main arguments were that if you are not in Google, Youtube and Wikipedia you do not exist for many people. He also showed the new video about the fast change of the media called “Did you know?“. The title for this post is adapted from that video.
4. Then it was our turn. Me, Anette and Juha-Matti had prepared a presentation for the Pellet project. I think about all of us felt on the previous days meeting with the projects people that most of them had challenges in marketing and reaching out people. However, Tatu said later that customers managed to cheat him again, because he says that it is very easy to say that “it’s marketing that we need” even though  the real challenges may be in the fields of leadership or something else. Maybe the tool to use with the clients could be the one from Toyota Way, to ask persistently five times “why” from the client. We created quite a chaos in the previous day but that’s another story.
5. Back to our show. We picked the pellet project, well, somehow it seemed to be easy to grasp on. We couldn’t avoid the idea of taking totally unsexy and hard to market product such as a pellet and make a little provocative marketing campaign a create a story for the product. You can see the slides below. Juha-Matti from Intotalo made the drawings, he’s very good! Also, we worked very well as a team and it was a good fun. We were working hard but still didn’t take it too seriously, I guess you can see that from the result, too

After our presentation we did a very quick energy discussion with the crowd.  Right after that all the young creative entrepreneurs went to the front to show once again who we all are. And last, but not least, we heard excellent Icelandic inspired improvisational piece by Rasmus, Carro and Elina. Good stuff. Then it was time to head off for a dinner. That was an escapist experience as well…

Now I am starting to think that the two last posts in our blog have been about Marketing. We are ind of trying to get away from that – it’s not the ocean we want to sail in. We are more into igniting collectives and making the world more fun and yellow. Well, coaching for marketing is something we offer, too. That’s a way to ignite collectives, isn’t it?

Ps. The T-shirts with Techno-Pelle doing the moonwalking will be available soon.

This is a short postcard to all of you. More detailed reporting may come a little later. Have a good weekend you all!

Here is a 5 min video with a short interviews of our new friend Niklas (the secretary general of Nordic Periphery Projects), Tatu Tantourist and Ville Monkey. Here we reflect all together what was our role. It’s filmed two days ago just before our final dinner at the spinning restaurant.

Ps. Two Icelandic and real cool initiatives in the fields of clothing and music, respectively: Naked Ape and GoGoYoKo. Check them out.

I have been rolling with the lottery ball and here are three happy winners on their way to icy & bubling land with recomments:
* Tatu – ofcourse born with golden spoon in the ass and founder of Monkey Business – good action ignitioner, stubborn but human, learning is passion
* Ville – founder of Monkey Business and grown up in periphery, nowadays happy owner of Liikenne Keränen, deep thinker, philosofist, theory mixer
* Johanna – lady to keep things on track and boys in leash, good organizer, power maker, humble leader

I copied some websites (from the event page) that our mixed team are involved with:

EVENT CREATION  www.insomniafestival.no
FREE CULTURAL PAPER GRUS www.grus.as
MONKEY BUSINESS www.banana.fi
VOCAL DEVOTION www.vocaldevotion.com
HEAVY METAL BAND SABATON  www.sabaton.net
CINEMATOGRAPHY http://www.tero-saikkonen.com/
PAIZANO DESIGN http://www.paizano.se/
STILETT DESIGN & COMMUNICATION http://www.designlabland.se/dlab/designlabland-group/
KRAMFORS STUDIO NOCRY www.studionocry.se
BOOMTOWN MUSIC BUSINESS COLLEGE www.boomtown.nu
CARTOON ARTIST http://www.incubiz.eu/page/story-4-blastwave-sfx-business-finland/
SOUND & PERFORMANCE ARTIST http://www.myspace.com/smulton
THE NOCRY VIRTUAL BUSINESS INCUBATOR www.incubiz.eu

You can download a pdf with profiles of the people coming and some other extra materials. Also, see a program draft pdf in here. Good graphics by Nic, again!

I will keep you posted about our trip through Social Media such as this blog, my Twitter, our new MonkeyTV, thru pictures via our new Flickr group and Facebook’s Monkey Business Page.

Why think out of the box when you can think inside as well? The comic strip above demonstrates that innovation can be brought about by being resourceful with what you have and by recognising your own potential. – Lava 09 website

Here’s a little comic strip by Juha-Matti which I found on the conference brochure. Download the 1 pager for more info through this website.

So maybe my, Ville Monkey’s, questions for you are: who should we meet for a coffee or beer in Iceland? Who could help us in this challenge to work over there for one week?