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Our latest updates, thoughts, and events — as they roll out.
Helsinki was the World Design Capital in 2012. The central stage and forum of the design year, the WDC pavilion was a centre for entertainment and learning from May till September 2012. Demos Helsinki curated the programme including discussion on poverty, design markets, lunch yoga, a short film festival, and…
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PEERSOME 2012 was the world’s first conference on peer groups and sustainable lifestyles. Groups rule the world. Groups breed new kinds of consumers. More confident, more powerful and most importantly more willing to change their lifestyles. Together. Research suggests that groups impact behaviour most strongly. The focus of PEERSOME 2012 were…
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If everyone you knew were to gather in one place to teach each other something, what would they be able to teach? We all know something someone else wants to learn about – this is why Demos Helsinki and the Helsinki Festival together with the Aalto University and The Finnish Innovation…
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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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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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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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