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Our latest updates, thoughts, and events — as they roll out.
Eight to ten Finnish teams will be picked for an accelerator program starting in Helsinki on monday the 31st of August. The teams will receive expert coaching in Finland as well as in-kind funding to travel to Frankfurt am Main, Germany to meet local startups and develop their own business…
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Calling all urbanists! Flow Festival and Demos Helsinki proudly present: Flow Talks: Urban Life – an inspiring Friday afternoon free to all Flow Festival Friday ticket holders. Join us for mind-expanding discussions, insightful co-creation and electrifying talks with a set of international urban influencers. We promise you will never look at…
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Planet Earth is becoming hyperconnected. This transformation is called the Internet of Things, Connected Devices, Programmable World, and many other names. As a result, we are at a major crossroads. What are the conditions under which this change becomes the guiding development of our time? How can we support positive…
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The Circular Design Toolkit helps policymakers move beyond recycling by focusing on upstream design decisions that shape sustainable value chains and industrial transformation.
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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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🗓️ Monday 26 October 2026
⏰ 10:00-12:00 (coffee served from 09:30)
📍 Sofia Helsinki, Lyhtysali (Sofiankatu 4 C, 00170 Helsinki, Finland)
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What does a stronger Europe actually require? Demos Helsinki’s comments on the State of the Union.
September 18, 2026
Drawing on three EU-funded research projects, we examine the tensions behind von der Leyen’s State of the Union address. Technological sovereignty risks deepening the dependencies it aims to reduce; climate resilience requires funding architecture that lets mitigation and adaptation reinforce each other; and Europe’s strength cannot be measured by economic indicators alone. A stronger Europe, we argue, depends less on ambition than on governance capable of delivering it.
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The next frontier for circularity is governance
September 17, 2026
For cross-cutting policy issues, like the transition to circularity, Demos Helsinki has developed a model that works: beating uncertainty through action, empowering relevant stakeholders with autonomy in problem solving, building a shared coordination structure, and adapting through learning what works. The model has been proven to move the circularity agenda forward, despite its complexity and fluctuating political significance.
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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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