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Our latest updates, thoughts, and events — as they roll out.
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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Low2No Camp was a strategic design workshop. In Low2No Camp thirty carefully chosen Helsinki-based urban activists came together to create and scale up groundbreaking projects from Restaurant day and Hemistan to Basso and Kääntöpöytä. These key people of Helsinki´s people-driven urban culture worked hard to take our thinking on what…
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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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