Open calls and co-creation

Open calls

In Open Calls we seek solutions from companies, universities or research institutes that want to develop their innovation with co-creation. The open calls are usually connected to digitalisation or carbon-neutral solutions. We’ll offer your company all the support and help needed while piloting new services in Helsinki – for free. In many of our projects, the whole city of Helsinki is available as a testbed for your innovation. Through piloting, you’ll achieve a proof of concept and valuable feedback from the end-users.

Co-creation

Co-creation is our method of developing new services for citizens. We bring the city, companies, research institutes and citizens to the same table to plan a new innovative urban solution. Citizens are often the end-users of your innovation. We can offer you a vast pool of citizens from Helsinki, who are interested in co-creation and testing your product. When you develop your innovation in co-creation, you get the valuable user experience from the whole city ecosystem.

The innovation process

With innovations, we aim for low-carbon urban solutions for Helsinki and the entire European Union. In our innovation process, Forum Virium’s is constantly looking for new innovation partners and projects. When the partners are together, the implementation of the project begins.

The typical project duration is from one to three years. The most visible phase is when companies test new solutions in real life settings across Helsinki. Pilots are often carried out at the same time in other European countries, depending on who is involved in the project.

If a new smart city solution works and finds its customers, companies often continue to commercialise it until it gets established as a new urban service. The learnings of the project are mostly open information that the entire urban ecosystem can utilise.

• Get to know the new urban solutions we have developed

Hackathons

We organize several hackathons every year. In them, programmers or companies are given a challenge that they try to solve during a short and intensive work period in the hackathon. In hackathons, we have developed solutions for, among other things, the city’s winter maintenance. Hackathon winners usually get a prize.

EU projects

Hundreds of companies have used EU funding in our pilot projects. The amounts vary from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of euros. For example, in the AI4Cities project, climate solutions utilising artificial intelligence were sought, and 1.45 million euros were used for company experiments.

Success stories of companies

Read more about the impact our co-creation projects have had. You can find more impact stories here.

“The SARA project was the base of our company. Now in 2023, we are operational in 15 care organisations with 24 robots.”

Annabella Hermans, SARA Robotics