AV-Growth programme is in action
The AV-Growth project’s Growth program for scale-up companies, led by Tampere University of Applied Sciences (TAMK) and run jointly with Film Tampere and the Swedish Yrkesnämnden för Film och TV (YNFT), kicked off in October 2024 with its first joint workshop in Tampere.
AV-Growth is a three-year project funded by the Interreg Central Baltic program. It aims to support cross-border cooperation among four participating countries: Finland, Sweden, Estonia, and Latvia. The project will engage with up to 30 scale-up companies from the AV sector from these four countries. The selected companies be provided business development support, trained in various workshops, and offered personal mentoring and networking opportunities over the next few years. Companies from different sectors were selected for the programme through an open call; AV production companies, the gaming industry, VR professionals, and agency and casting operations. By bringing together different creative industry companies, the aim is to create genuinely new connections and offer opportunities to develop operational models and innovations that are new to the industry. The general goal of the project is to support scale-up companies in the AV and creative sectors in their international growth and in the development and implementation of larger international cooperation projects.
Film Tampere’s main task is to plan and organize six different workshops for the selected companies, acquire mentors for the companies, facilitate mentoring activities, and monitor the achieving of the companies’ growth targets.
The first workshop of the project was held in Tampere during the Music x Media event in October 2024. 27 of the 30 selected companies were able to attend in person at Tampere Hall – the workshop gathered 14 companies from Finland, 5 from Sweden, 4 from Estonia, and 4 from Latvia. The two-day training included intensive lectures on business maturity and growth strategy building, teamwork and creative thinking, and mental well-being as a tool for growth and leadership. During the days, joint tasks were also carried out with other participants, and the companies were given ‘homework’ related to their own strategic planning.
The next on-site workshop of AV-Growth will be held during the Gothenburg Film Festival in January in Sweden, and before that, the companies have continued working with Film Tampere and mentors online.
During the project, media students from TAMK will produce podcast broadcasts and video recordings of the workshops, which will be available on the project’s official website in January 2025. The expert interviews and insights from the participants will be analysed for creating a series of best practices of cross-border collaboration, as well as a concept to be piloted with media students from TAMK and Swedish education institutions in 2026.
