Business Finland Seizes Future Market Opportunities through Missions
Business Finland is launching a mission-based approach in accordance with its strategy. The goal of the mission-based approach is to provide Finnish companies with more opportunities to take advantage of future market opportunities. Missions are also intended to facilitate societal and systemic changes and to respond to global challenges. The first pilot mission is Carbon Neutral Finland. Helena Sarén has been chosen as the lead for this mission.
The mission concept is a new process for Business Finland. In practice, missions combine long-term strategic forecasting with helping companies here and now.
"With missions, our aim is to create value for society on a broad scale and to identify significant future market opportunities for Finnish companies. Going forward, Business Finland's program will be strongly based on missions. This means both the pilot missions that are launched now and missions that will be launched in the future", says Business Finland's Strategic Insight lead Heli Karjalainen.
"We are trying to do our part to ensure that Finnish actors are involved in creating solutions for changing times rather than simply adjusting to evolving markets. Missions will allow us to ensure that all of Business Finland's tools are used effectively to build Finnish competency and competitiveness", concludes Karjalainen.
The topics that Business Finland's missions deal with are selected from sectors that are experiencing global changes, This way, missions also provide significant future market opportunities for Finnish companies.
"A reduction in carbon is a historic change. The energy sector, the manufacturing industry and the transport sector are global drivers of low-carbon development. These sectors are also vital for Finnish exports. These sectors must modernize rapidly and come up with new business models, for example, through the help of digitalization, a circular economy and new kinds of international partnerships The low-carbon approach will also affect other industries such as the food and consumer industries. This could create completely new business opportunities for our companies", says Helena Sarén, Head of the Carbon Neutral Finland mission.
Sarén has an extensive and diverse background in internationalization and growth. Among other roles, she has acted as the program lead for Business Finland's Smart Energy Finland program and been in charge of cleantech sector operations in Invest in Finland. She has also worked for companies operating in an international environment.
"The very first thing that mission leads get to do is to create a long-term strategic plan. This will be done in close co-operation with external stakeholders, both in Finland and internationally.
More information
Heli Karjalainen
heli.karjalainen (at) businessfinland.fi
