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Our latest updates, thoughts, and events — as they roll out.
Juha Leppänen, head of democracy and capabilities research area at Demos Helsinki, sat down with Monocle’s Matt Alagiah to discuss Finnish education. Why are arts and skills classes mandatory in Finnish schools? Monocle investigates. You can read more about Monocle here and purchase the 2015 Hospitality Issue from this link.
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Last summer, I started talking with an American professor while waiting for a non-existent ferry in Istanbul. I soon found out that he happened to be one of the few early developers of the original iPhone and had only recently left the company. We joked about Nokia, and later during…
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The second Peloton Smart Retro Innovation Camp brought together 13 innovative startups from all over Europe in Stockholm. The participants designed tests with larger partner companies and the public sector. The camp concluded in a pitch show won by Kvalitid. Kvalitid is a service that provides apartment buildings with domestic help…
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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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