Today SHIP – the conference center, co-working space and open area that has been around since 2007, will change name to Mindpark. For me, this is one step of many on the business centers journey to become an ever more important place in the Scandinavian entrepreneurial and creative scene.

SHIP has had two simple words that guide us: creativity and productivity. We believe the right amount of both are what creates great value. SHIP has always been about being a hotspot for different professionals, a place where people of different ages and different ambitions work together in the co-working areas. A place where students spend their days drinking coffee and studying downstairs, entrepreneurs start companies and big corporations like IKEA and IBM have a daily presence. A place where open seminars have been held weekly for years, where creativity workshops are the norm and where collaboration and serendipity meetings occur on a daily basis.

When I embarked on the journey to head SHIP, it was a place not like it is now. Having been started by the City of Helsingborg, it started out as an ambitious project – creating a place for tomorrow, where students, entrepreneurs and citizen would meet. This ambition is what drew me to the place, and is still what makes me dedicated to this place.

However, it has not been a straight journey. For a couple of years the City of Helsingborg had a large impact on the workspaces and use of SHIP, with the ambitious H+ project having it’s headquarter here. A project that since has moved its HQ, but we see Mindpark as a physical manifestation of the projects goals and visions. A place where the future is made.

Since 2011 SHIP has been headed by me, and I have tried to make it the place I would love to work and be at myself. And I think we have managed well – every day when I walk into the place a feeling of joy comes over me, and I do believe that this is amongst the best co-working spaces that there is – anywhere.

Why change from SHIP?

When we started to talk about a name change it was because the name, unfortunately, is misleading. Anyone who has not been here has a hard time to understand what we are. This is complicated enough to understand if you look at all the things we do or events we host, but was made even more so by a name that made no connection to what we actually do. Contrary to what many believed when they first heard about it, SHIP is not a ship – it is in fact an old factory, the old Tretorn factory to be precise.
This caused us frequent problems when communicating with people outside our own sphere, and I decided early on that a name change was needed in the long run. And that time has come.

Why Mindpark?

To keep to our own philosophy or being creative but also always productive, we early decided that the name change will not result in a perfect name, but rather just in a better name. We therefore made a relatively quick process out of it – a deliberate choice, because we did not want the organization to be drained on energy because of the re-branding.
We invited everyone connected to SHIP to a couple of workshops where we wanted input in potential names. And a lot of interesting and cool names were thought up. However, on one of the workshops Joakim Jardenberg participated, one of the residents at SHIP, and from him came the idea of actually using Mindpark – a brand that he owned and had created. Joakim thought that what we did was good, and with himself not using the brand on a regular basis, he thought it would be just fitting to let it change a little. To let it become a physical place and to live on in a new form. And after all – he already had donated the Mindpark sofa to us…

I think it is truly a very fitting name – located as we are next to the University of Lund Campus Helsingborg, and with the future economy being only more and more service oriented, it is just natural that we should not be a science park, but instead a mindpark – a place where knowledge is shared, ideas grow and minds challenged.

Why now?

There is never a good time to change a brand. So the decision was simple: it will not be a better time in a couple of years – so we should do it now.

Mindparks history

The ”old Mindpark” was established in 2007 as the brainchild of Joakim Jardenberg, with a group of traditional media companies as founders. The purpose was to enable collaboration and development in all things digital between the five owners. In 2010 Jardenberg took over the company and focus changed from the media industry to business transformation in a broader sense. At the same time Jardenberg rebranded his business to be run under his own name and Mindpark became a blog platform for a large number of Swedish experts and internet pundits. After a couple of great years the activity has declined in the last year, and now it’s time for yet another change. The next chapter in the Mindpark history. Joakim tells the story from his perspective over at jardenberg.se.

It’s a journey

We do not see this as neither a beginning nor an end, neither for SHIP or for Mindpark. Rather, we see that the path of Mindpark and SHIP are crossing, and that taking on the new name would bolster both – it would make what SHIP is clearer and easier to understand for people new to us. And it would continue to go with the spirit in which Mindpark has operated, even if with some tweaks and twists.

The future for Mindpark looks bright – we have done some interesting things already, and have even bigger plans for the future. For me, this is the best place I have ever worked from, and we will make sure we can create an even better enviroment and community around this in the future. And make sure that we continue to be guided by our two words: productivity and creativity.

Read more or contact us

If you want to learn more about us, browse our about us site, stay connected with our Facebook or Twitter.

Feel also free to take a look at our about us page, where you can take a virtual tour in our facilities, as well as the press site with some photos from different environments here on Mindpark.