When things start to work, we should let them do so! Good feeling and excited atmosphere can create so much more than lectures, even good ones.

21st of January 2017, 10:45 am twentythree Estonian guests were landed to Finnish shore. There were mostly tourism entrepreneurs from different locations of Estonia and some staff members from Viljandi Culture Academy. The most curious thing was that many of Culture Academy staff members were also entrepreneurs. So they were not on this trip as teachers but after cooperation with fellow entrepreneurs. Very good starting point for joint training! And training was why our Estonian guests had arrived. Weekend together for creative cooperation with simple target: joint products and services that will be offered to tourists at Lights On! sites.
But at first we went to Helsinki fair centre and visited Nordic Travel Fair for inspiration and ideas. And both inspiration and ideas was what we found! Ideas about games and gamification, events, products and new trends in activity tourism. And Ideas didn’t stop in what we saw, but we also took a look to those things we thought were missing. And yes there was something missing. Different municipalities, travel operators and accommodation services were advertising places and buildings where they were situated. But if you want to know what you can do there it was more difficult to find answers. So we though that we should do otherwise and concentrate about actions instead of locations.
But we had training which was aiming for cooperation so first we of course did something to get to

know each other. It was nice to see how good we all felt together. It seems that we Finns and our Estonian friend really are brothers and sisters. It was so easy to become friends. And for friends it’s easy to co-create products and services to tourists. And we did. Of course few hours together can’t produce finished and ready products, but something to start with. Yet I was surprised how concrete ideas was made for further development. It seems that already next summer we will have events for voluntary workers, historical games, joint adventures and maybe some items to buy which combine all eight locations together. If we work together with good feeling we can achieve whatever we want! So keep your ears open. Secrets will revealed and services will be launched soon enough…

Timo Parkkola