What’s the most inspiring thing about working in a health and life sciences startup hub? What makes a warm and welcoming startup community? Let’s chat with Liina Laukkanen, the newest addition to our small but mighty management team!
1. Hello! Who are you?
I’m Liina Laukkanen, the Community and Program Manager of our lovely startup hub – and art and roleplaying game enthusiast known for my never-ending love for sunsets.
For most of my life, I’ve lived in Eastern Helsinki, whereas my studies have been located in both the Viikki and Meilahti campuses of the University of Helsinki, making these campuses very close to my heart. I did my BSc in Biology and later my MSc in Translational Medicine, focusing on physiology, neuroscience and psychobiology. During my studies, I did several internships in Eero Castrén’s neurotrophin lab in the Neuroscience Center, HiLIFE. That gave me lots of insightful first-hand experience of the researcher’s work and further emphasized the importance of science and the people behind it.
Before joining the Terkko team, I worked at Helsinki Think Company, where I started learning about academic entrepreneurship and how to utilize it as one way to make an impact on society. That was a turning point that sparked inspiration in me to find my place in this wonderful ecosystem of change-makers where I can work for something important to me while helping others reach their goals. Terkko, which is focused on helping the health and life sciences startups to thrive and housing a pre-incubator programme to help early-stage teams to get their ideas into action, has been a wonderful place for that!
2. What’s your role at Terkko?
As a Community and Program Manager, my role is to develop our services further to answer our community’s needs and create a feeling of community and belonging. Especially after covid started, the work-life culture has changed as people have gotten more used to working remotely. Now that restrictions have been lifted, I’m looking forward to meeting our members face to face and arranging events and gatherings on-site to bring people together.
I’m also in charge of our pre-incubator programme Terkko Health X which is also part of the University of Helsinki’s recently launched incubator programmes. This year Terkko is also celebrating its 5th anniversary. We’re planning on making a bigger event to celebrate both Terkko and Terkko Health X finale at the end of the programme – that’s something you don’t want to miss!
3. What’s the best thing that has already happened this year? What are you most looking forward to in 2022?
That might be a somewhat boring answer, but I’ve been very happy that the covid restrictions have finally been lifted. I started working at Terkko during the pandemic when our team was also working quite a lot remotely, and I’ve totally missed what our community was like before. Even though that has been very understandable, finally meeting our community members daily and seeing life return to our hub has been a huge thing for me. Poetically speaking, it feels like spring has finally arrived. And in fact, it has.
Additionally, it has been exciting to work at the University of Helsinki’s Incubator team and start further developing our pre-incubator programme and other activities at the Meilahti campus together with others. I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of entrepreneurial activity all University of Helsinki campuses will have in the near future!
4. You have a hardcore life science background, and you’ve ended up in the startup world. What have your impressions been, and how have you adjusted to a completely different world?
I’m a rather new addition to our community as I started officially working at Terkko in November 2021. I enjoy coming to work each day, and everyone has received me so well – both our Terkko team and our startup members. I’ve liked how in Terkko, it’s possible to meet different people who do important work for a better future. For example, our startup members are solving real-life problems related to health, and it has been interesting to find out what kind of solutions they have created. It’s inspiring.
As a Community and Program Manager, I’d like to make Terkko look even more like the people in our hub and take care that everyone feels welcome in our community as they are. After all, people are the ones that make the community.