Innovation partnership

Why should you choose Forum Virium Helsinki for an innovation partnership in an innovation and research project? Well, to make it short, we at the City of Helsinki’s non-profit innovation company, Forum Virium Helsinki, will help you utilise our city as a living test lab and our citizens as your real-life test audience, and provide you, as our project partner, with the support of our top-notch Smart City, Smart Mobility and Data innovation, funding and communications specialists. We look forward to opportunities to tackle challenges and ways to improve the city services and the well-being of the citizens.

What we offer to our partners

Now, let us dig deeper into Helsinki’s and Forum Virium’s unique role in the European innovation scene. We’re different, in many ways, from other Nordic cities and stakeholders. This is what we can offer to our innovation partners:

• Innovation support
• Expertise in co-creation
• Open data and sustainable solutions
• What if? Test it with City of Helsinki’s Digital Twin
• Happiest country and best work-life balance in the world

Innovation support

With Forum Virium’s help, within our joint projects, companies and research institutions have been able to use Helsinki as an innovation platform, receiving valuable feedback from the services’ end-users: the residents. Agile pilots have even led to the creation of new and innovative companies.

Helsinki is particularly known for its people-oriented and participatory smart city development. Many of the smart city, smart mobility and data innovations co-created in Forum Virium Helsinki’s pilots are now making daily life easier for urban residents across Europe.

As a project partner, we also offer you our extensive national and EU wide R&I collaboration experience with 150 successful EU projects and 70 M€ EU funding received. Contact our project development team for more information.

Expertise in co-creation

Co-creation is our method of developing new services for citizens. We will help our project partners to find the right people from the public sector, universities and other companies to co-create with. When you develop your innovation in co-creation, you get the valuable user experience from the whole city ecosystem, including the end users – the citizens.  

Open data and sustainable solutions

Helsinki’s interfaces are constantly being opened, enabling external developers to develop new applications and create new business.

In terms of smart city development, one of Helsinki’s greatest strengths is open data. Helsinki is one of the most open cities in the world in terms of data. The City’s objective is that the data it produces will be the most useable and most widely used in the world by 2025. 

Sustainability is one of Forum Virium’s core values and guides everything we do. One of the main goals of our projects is to co-create smart city innovations that improve the quality of life of urban residents and reduce the environmental impact of urban life.

What if? Test it with City of Helsinki’s Digital Twin

With a vast amount of open data, the development of the city’s digital twin is fast and agile. 

Helsinki is known worldwide as an active innovator of the digital twin of the City, which comprises all relevant data for developers, managers and research to utilise. The 3D modelling of the city also creates a useful platform for further use cases. In the near future, the digital twin will help ie. in streamline traffic, urban air mobility, maintenance, repairs and the reduction of emissions in real time.

Happiest country and best work-life balance in the world

In 2023, the Sustainable Development Solutions Network of the United Nations named Finland the happiest country in the world – for the sixth year in a row! In the study the respondents’ evaluation results were correlated with factors such as GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity and corruption.

As the capital of Finland, Helsinki has been named as the best city for work-life balance in the world and Finland as the best country in a comparison of human well-being. The culture in Finnish organisations, like ours, is egalitarian and hierarchy is low. Due to low power distance, people are expected to be treated as equals, regardless of personal background. 

Finland’s urban planning also makes people feel healthy and safe which is closely related to social sustainability. In fact, Finland ranks first, second or third in over 100 global measures of economic and social success.

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Photo: Vesa Laitinen