Marketing Mikkeli & South Savo

"My Mikkeli" needs your active energies Help us

Greetings!

MyMikkeli, a local marketing & education initiative, helps you increase the value of your home and also generates funds for regional development. This website is a central platform to acquaint the wider community with each other's energies and ideas - explore our links at left!

How can we compete for investment, tourists, and key human resources?

The harshest of our findings is to avoid relying on comfortable administrators & politicians to drive development. We need community understanding of the harsh competitiveness of economic geography. This requires vision and leadership. To succeed we must generate a sense of crisis and hunger quite foreign to permanently-employed, steady-salaried local bureaucrats. Ambitious politicians migrate elsewhere. Finding catalysts for change among cozy circumstances will always be challenging, but success requires doing something above & beyond the competition. MyMikkeli made positive steps. Outside experts and additional people of varying opinion (perhaps you!) interacting with ambitious & clever youth can help us all.

This project grew via courses on "Destination Marketing" at the Aalto University School of Economics (formerly Helsinki School of Economics), Mikkeli. Supported by local citizenry, business and regional authorities, over sixty clever and eager students from fifteen nations (and various parts of Finland, Savonlinna & Mikkeli) focused energies & inspiration on place appeal and discovering sustainable future growth possibilities for Mikkeli & South Savo, Finland. We analyzed successful catalytic projects elsewhere and worked on local marketing scenarios. We continue to study techniques for stimulating development, the economics of jobs and local vitality, the marketing and mechanics of inward investment and tourism, community spaces and synergies, and the importance of 'internal marketing' to bring the wider community closer to key people working on these issues.

One past final presentation took the form of more than 70 posters created for the My Mikkeli Poster Festival (freely open to the public), when students were on hand to give & receive comments on their work. (Many posters also illustrate this site - see links at left & click to enlarge). The poster festival attracted an enthusiastic and charmingly mixed audience. A selection of the posters, award-winning and otherwise, was again displayed at the Mikkeli University Consortium (Lönnrotinkatu 7, Mikkeli) on 13 May 2008, Flora Day. A highlight of our 2009 program was enjoying night ice swimming on Sami National Day (6 February; talvi-illan avantouinti) with the local resources of Mikkelin Avantouimarit.

Study Our Accomplishments We're hopeful for future programs, and to begin training local community participants (where we may award a course Certificate in Place Marketing). We might also / alternately develop the first MyMikkeli Market, or setup a Localversity® campus. Demand Local Action - too little's been achieved over the past twenty years while other regions have thrived. Let's cleverly battle depopulation and create more regional prosperity !

We've skilled resources from throughout Finland and around the world based in Mikkeli's assorted universities. Why not enlist international business students in your projects, as paid workers or intern volunteers? Utilize student interests, energies and creativity: you'll be amazed at how much can be done at reasonable cost. Each small success stimulates regional dynamism.

Our project was nicely introduced (in Finnish) in a Länsi-Savo news article

aloha,

Dr. Bruce Henry Lambert
Professor & Development Director, Localversity

Please help: mail bruce@localversity.com with ideas, voluntarism, events assistance, finance
        (mention 'Mikkeli' in subject line please)

My Mikkeli Poster Festival

    Our "My Mikkeli" logo is from the signature of Baron Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, President & Marshal of Finland; he lived & worked in Mikkeli.