Smart City Espoo

Inhabitants: 288,960
Jobs: 

With its close to 300.000 inhabitants, Espoo is the second biggest city in Finland and recognized worldwide as an innovation environment for science, art and the economy. Espoo is home for education and research institutes such as Aalto University and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, but also global corporations such as Nokia, Kone and Fortum. Espoo is also a significant growth company incubator: all Finnish unicorns, i.e. technology startups valued at over a billion dollars, have emerged in Espoo. These include MySQL and the game companies Supercell and Rovio. 

Boosting the local innovation ecosystem in Espoo is based on an experimental culture and co-creation. The goal of the city is to be an active partner to citizens, NGOs, research institutions, companies and other stakeholders.

Espoo is committed to being the best partner as a city, providing testbeds for piloting new solutions, which can then be scaled up and utilized in other parts of the world to tackle the vicious challenges of our time. 

The slogan of Espoo co-creation is "Make with Espoo". The slogan underlies the need to look at the city’s role in a new way. Cities and municipalities have to work together with different actors to more actively seek solutions to challenges related to changes that individuals, communities, companies, the society and the environment are going through. Generally, co-creation refers to cooperation between residents, professionals in the public sector, companies and RDI institutes to improve public services. 

Co-creation also occurs in urban living labs, which are limited urban spaces used for experiments and co-development of information and innovations based on learning. In other words, the City of Espoo opens doors and invites all stakeholders of municipal services from companies to associations, research institutions and residents to refine old services and innovate new ones together.