Every region wants more growth companies. The hard part is that growth companies don’t start as growth companies. They start as a hunch, a half-written pitch and a few people willing to test it.
Since 2023, Crazy Town has run Startup Express Oulu, a 100-day pre-incubator, together with BusinessOulu. Two intakes a year, in English, open to anyone with an idea, or even just the wish to join a team. We recently went back through every application from thefirst seven intakes to see what this early pipeline actually looks like. The short answer: 162 idea submissions, 160 unique ideas, around 23 per intake, spread across 15 different fields. That’s a steady flow of new ideas in a single city, at the stage where most ecosystems can’t see them yet. For companies looking for innovation partners and for public organisations tasked with growing local business, that early view is worth a lot.
What the pipeline looks like up close?
Business software and SaaS is the largest group, at 29 ideas, or about 18% of the total. But the real story is the breadth. Physical products and e-commerce (18), consumer apps and marketplaces (16), health and medtech (13), education (12), B2B services (12), creative industries (11) and food (10) all have a solid presence. Hardware, wellbeing, travel, sustainability, mobility and fintech fill out the tail. Three trends stand out for anyone thinking about regional growth or corporate innovation:
1. Deep tech is rising. Only one hardware or deep-tech idea came in during 2023–2024. Since 2025 there have been six, including drones for cleaning solar panels and wind turbines, AI-driven landmine detection and robots that learn from human demonstrations.
2. Health is growing fast. Ten of the 13 health, medtech and biotech ideas arrived in 2025–2026, many built on research such as photonics-based biosensors.
3. AI is now the default. It shows up across categories, from bookkeeping and recruitment to travel and construction management.
There is also a gap worth noting. Sustainability and energy ideas have been rare, only five in total and none in the last two intakes. For a company or region with green-transition goals, that’s an invitation: the pipeline won’t fill this space on its own. It needs a challenge, a partner or a themed call to pull those ideas out.
The Building Blocks of Growth
During the pre-incubator programme, a few important insights into building growth have emerged.
Scaleups are rare, and it’s difficult to identify future success stories at the idea stage. What we can do is give as many people as possible the opportunity to test their ideas. The more ideas enter the pipeline, the more potential companies can emerge.
However, growth isn’t just about the number of companies founded. Not every Startup Express team starts a company, and those that do don’t necessarily follow the programme’s timetable. Some teams have merged, some ideas have changed completely, and some companies from the first 2023 cohort were registered as late as spring 2025. Pushing founders to register a company before they’re ready isn’t responsible. The networks, skills and entrepreneurial thinking they gain along the way still contribute to the local economy.
Another important lesson is the value of community and peer support. What makes an early-stage programme work is the community around it: people who’ve been there, coaches in the room and teams learning from each other. That’s social capital, and building it takes deliberate effort.
Diverse founders also bring diverse ideas. Startup Express runs in English because many new ventures in Oulu are started by people with international backgrounds. That’s one reason the pipeline covers everything from Finnish-language learning tools to Korean food pop-ups to defence drones. A programme that’s open to more people sees more of what a region can do.
How Crazy Town can help
Startup Express is one example of what Crazy Town’s growth and innovation team does. We design and run programmes for companies, cities, regions and universities, in Finland and across Europe, drawing on a national community of more than 400 organisations.
For cities, regions and development organisations, we offer pre-incubators, incubators and accelerators that help build a local pipeline of entrepreneurs and new business ideas, like Startup Express with BusinessOulu. We also organise activation programmes and events, such as hackathons, idea competitions and matchmaking, that bring new people and ideas into the ecosystem. With more than 20 years of experience, we design, launch and operate innovation hubs and coworking spaces.
For companies, we offer themed accelerators that bring startups together to solve specific business challenges. EriCa Reactor, run in collaboration with Kemira, helps green innovations move from the lab to the market twice a year. We also provide open innovation and matchmaking services that connect companies with startups as partners or suppliers, as in Startup Deal Vantaa. Through workshops, facilitation and studies, we help companies explore and test new ideas and directions quickly.
The same approach works at very different scales. FUEL, for Education Finland, accelerated 10 Finnish and Ukrainian EdTech teams and created 100 new collaboration contacts. Deep Tech Launchpad gathered 100 university-based ideas from eight countries. For NATO LANDCOM, the EFDL Innovation Range brought 17 defence companies together with around 250 representatives from NATO and partner organisations to test solutions in the field.
Want to see what your region’s or company’s idea pipeline could look like? Let’s talk.
Contact us or visit: crazytown.fi/en/growth-and-innovation-services/
This article was written by Jan Schmidt, Program Manager of Startup Express Oulu.
