Many UAS lecturers enjoy a variety of roles to boost their professional careers. Combining teaching with a range of RDI activities gives a deeper understanding of the teaching topics as well as ensures continuous self-development. Vice versa, students get their teaching hot from the academia and sometimes get to participate in research activities themselves.

In this blog article I share my experiences in involving two student groups in our current Upbeat project, that aims to upskill young immigrant entrepreneurs by utilizing a variety of AI tools in entrepreneurial training. The curriculum is co-designed with our partners StartUp Refugees and Estonia Refugee Council, and the trainings will take place in Helsinki and Tallinn in April and May 2025.

Creating the Upbeat training identity

After the initial requirements and analysis phase, the first concrete task in the Upbeat project was to create a visual identity for the training course. This was a great opportunity to involve our Haaga-Helia marketing students via creative agency Krea, as they are the real experts on how to address young talent.

The task was to create a name, visual identity, marketing copy and social media post examples for the upcoming training programme. The Krea online course had nearly 50 students, who each made their own proposal as part of a creative portfolio for the course. The results were first group assessed with the students down to ten best designs, which were further reduced to six designs. These were assessed and commented by the Upbeat project group. Eventually we agreed on the winning design concept.

The name and the slogan of the course became Start Smart – be the next gen. The visual identity combines fresh and bright gradient colours with an eye catching ‘mercury splash’ element and some lively soap bubbles. The project team complemented the design for its bold take on the subject and not going down the most obvious path of using the project image with people doing teamwork as the main visual.

Creating multimodal training materials

Haaga-Helia’s Krea students also participated in making some of the training materials for the entrepreneurship course. The perfect landing platform for this was the Krea Marketing Technologies and Trends course, where we delve deeply into AI, XR and gamification in marketing. The course started in January 2025, and six student teams took on the task of creating the training materials.

Each team chose an industry they were interested in from a list of the most common ones for immigrants starting businesses in Finland: food, beauty and games industries, as well as arts and digital content creation. The final output was to make a Future Guide for a young immigrant entrepreneur on how to promote and market their business.

In addition, each team utilized AI to make demonstrative learning materials. They used HeyGen for an explainer video on marketing trends, Google’s NotebookLM to make a podcast about emerging technologies, ThingLink to make an immersive learning experience and different prototyping tools to demonstrate the possibilities of gamification in marketing. The materials will be used during the training to illustrate the entrepreneurs’ possible futures in their chosen industries.

The Upbeat project’s cooperation with Krea courses is a perfect example of bringing RDI and teaching together to provide added value to both parties – the project gets fresh materials that appeals to young adults and students get a real-life project to prepare them for creative work.

Picture: Haaga-Helia