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Our latest updates, thoughts, and events — as they roll out.
The real meaning of co-creation and participatory processes is not listening to more opinions and fine-tuning the outcomes accordingly but honestly open-ended deliberation and distributed decision-making on things that matter to us. That is how these processes can bring more democracy in democracy. Outi Kuittinen from Demos Helsinki talks to…
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Our societies are undergoing fundamental change driven by the emergence of platforms. The way people come together, communicate and create value is changing. In a possible future, all of our interactions with strangers will be facilitated by global digital platforms: from trade to meetings to sex to services and peer-help….
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Smart city has become an umbrella concept bringing together strategies for reinventing cities utilizing ICT. Smart city promises drastic leap in energy efficiency, less congestion, more humane conditions, in hot and crowded urban spaces, and overall responsiveness to needs of urban dwellers. Until now, the concept of smart city…
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Drawing on almost five years of Cities Mission implementation, Demos Helsinki and its partners from Dark Matter Labs and the Mission Board argue that mission governance has reached policy readiness. Its mechanisms have been tested, its governance infrastructure is in place, and it offers a transferable model for delivering on EU strategic priorities at scale.
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Finland managed the Covid-19 pandemic comparatively well. Yet the longer the crisis lasted, the more visible the limits of the governance system became. This brief examines what a prolonged crisis revealed about institutional strength, societal vulnerabilities, and the kind of governance future crises demand.
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Decades of low growth in Finland may be a symptom of a weakened capacity for renewal inside organisations, including the country’s top businesses. In this report, we explore the role that Finnish companies play in the current growth environment and document what business leaders think should be done next. We conclude with key recommendations for boards and executive teams to create the conditions for a renewed purpose in business, one that fits the current Finnish context and reveals underused capacity for renewal.
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Governing with cities: Europe’s overlooked governance infrastructure
July 21, 2026
The Cities Mission functioned as a natural experiment that revealed an overlooked property of European governance: cities do not merely implement policy more effectively; they generate governing capacity and governance knowledge that Europe should intentionally incorporate into policy design through a revised multilevel governance architecture.
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The next MFF should institutionalise what mission governance has proven
July 21, 2026
The challenge for the next MFF is not to invent a new governance model, but to organise European decision-making around the governing capacity that already exists.
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Governments can steer with wellbeing at the core (but nobody said it was easy)
April 28, 2026
Governments keep promising change and then hitting the same walls with the old machinery. Reorienting governance around human wellbeing is both urgent and possible, and the work continues even when the political climate turns.
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