Latest content
Our latest updates, thoughts, and events — as they roll out.
Helsinki Challenge finalists have been chosen. The five teams that will be heading towards the Grand Finale are: Biodiversity now, Helsinki Sleep Factory, Moralities of Intelligent Machines, NEMO and Safepreg. Read more about them here. Demos Helsinki congratulates!
→ Continue reading
Demos Helsinki has been around since 2005, here is the decade in numbers! You can also lurk from here what went down in our ten year anniversary party 10th of September 2015.
→ Continue reading
CoReorient, the company behind the PiggyBaggy crowdsourced delivery service that has been part of Demos Helsinki’s Smart Retro project, has been selected as a finalist in the SXSW Eco Startup competition taking place on October 5-7, 2015 in Austin, TX. The world-famous South by Southwest events have been organized since 1987. For…
→ Continue reading
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.
→ Continue reading
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.
→ Continue reading
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.
→ Continue reading
- All
- AI
- Business
- Cities
- Civil service
- Construction
- Democracy
- Economy
- Foresight
- Health & Wellbeing
- Industry & innovation
- Justice
- Public governance
- Research
- Skills & work
- Society
- Sustainability & climate action
- Sustainability governance
- Technology
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.
→ Continue reading
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.
→ Continue reading
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.
→ Continue reading