Wärtsilä, Tieto, St1, Fortum and Demos Helsinki launch Innovation Community initiative to speed clean energy targets

Wärtsilä, Tieto, St1, Fortum and Demos Helsinki have introduced their Innovation Community initiative aimed at drastically accelerating the global energy sector’s transition to cleaner, more environmentally sustainable energy generation. The announcement of this initiative was made in Helsinki at the Slush 2018, the world’s leading startup event.

Innovation Community is creating a forum for restructuring the roles and positions of the energy chain players. This will provide an arena in which to study, improve, experiment, validate, and bring to market innovations that challenge current energy system paradigms. The business-driven, action-oriented, and ambitious programme intends to seize and drive new opportunities emerging with the transition towards clean energy production.

“The Nordic business federations, e.g. the Confederation of Finnish Industries (EK), just committed to supporting a fast implementation of the global Paris agreement. It is not a coincidence that these forerunner companies who drive the energy revolution forward also come from the Nordics” says Outi Kuittinen, Senior Expert at Demos Helsinki and the manager of the community.

The community has been established based on building trust and facilitating the challenging first steps for collaboration between its members. The goals include building a vision and roadmap for accelerating the transition to renewable energy sources, and experimenting and bringing to market promising new initiatives. The programme will also provide a platform for multi-stakeholder collaboration with corporations, startups, universities, NGOs, and the public sector through dialogue, open events, and jointly organized projects.

“Organisations create innovations increasingly through networks, together. The expertise, data, technologies, practices and other resources of these companies, combined, create genuinely a big potential for the emergence of innovations, and significant new business, for a rethought energy value chain”, Kuittinen says.

For more information, please contact:

Outi Kuittinen

Senior Expert

+358 50 326 5582

outi.kuittinen@demoshelsinki.fi