Technology Industries of Finland launches a foresight capability development project with Futures Platform and More Than Strategy
Finland's technology sector works on long horizons in an environment that increasingly moves faster. A new collaboration with Futures Platform and More Than Strategy aims to strengthen the sector’s ability to build a better understanding of alternative future scenarios and make future-fit decisions.
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Technology Industries of Finland has launched a collaboration with Futures Platform and More Than Strategy to develop foresight capability across the association and the sector. The aim is to identify changes in the operating environment, understand their future implications and the alternative paths they could open, and turn that understanding into future-fit decisions and actions.
Finnish technology companies work on long horizons. Investment and capability decisions are made years before they show up in revenue. The environment those decisions land in moves faster than that: geopolitical tension, the rapid development of AI, the debate on Europe's strategic autonomy, climate impacts and shifting global dependencies.
Because the sector is strongly export-driven and connected to global value chains, most of these changes begin somewhere else, long before they show up as a question for a Finnish company. Together, they require Finnish companies to assess the future in new ways.
“Our operating environment has become faster-paced and more uncertain. Companies must be able to identify changes earlier and assess what they mean for their own business. Foresight helps us do this,” says Akseli Koskela, Director of Foresight and Preparedness at Technology Industries of Finland.
Some of the questions are already on the table: critical technologies, the effects of AI on industry and working life, where the next growth comes from, whether the skilled people will be there. The harder category is the one the project is really aimed at. A question that has been named can be resourced and planned for. But the changes that reshape an industry tend to arrive from outside its field of view — as someone else's problem, in someone else's sector, until the moment they are not. Through foresight, the aim is also to help companies identify the questions they do not yet know to ask.
“One of the best aspects of foresight is that it helps us identify the questions about the future that, once answered, enable us to discover new opportunities. There is currently a lot of discussion in society about growth. At the heart of growth is staying attuned to what is happening in the operating environment and considering how these changes may affect the way we operate,” says Sointu Kouki, CEO of More Than Strategy.
That is also where the value of foresight becomes visible.
"The value of foresight shows when it is connected to decision-making and concrete action," says Marianna Mäki-Teeri, Director of Foresight Analysis at Futures Platform. "It enables more future-resilient decisions, broadens the range of options, and helps identify innovations and opportunities for growth."
More Than Strategy brings expertise in foresight processes and strategic thinking. Futures Platform brings international futures intelligence and the tools to work with it systematically. By bringing in external partners, Technology Industries of Finland aims to introduce new perspectives, challenge established ways of examining the operating environment and bring global insights to meet their needs.
The work will particularly strengthen Technology Industries of Finland’s ability to identify emerging phenomena and weak signals from around the world, interpret their possible development paths and assess their impacts on companies in the technology industry. The aim is to build a broader and more systematic understanding of what is happening in the operating environment of technology industry companies — also beyond the sector itself and its immediate impacts.
Over time, the aim is for Technology Industries of Finland to serve as an interpreter of change for its members, and for companies to have better conditions to prepare, grow and move early.
“Our aim is for our member companies to be able to connect global megatrends to their own business. The goal is that we can help companies identify their own future threats and opportunities, and act on them,” Koskela summarises.
Further information
Marianna Mäki-Teeri
Director of Foresight Analysis, Futures Platform
marianna.maki-teeri@futuresplatform.com
Sointu Kouki
CEO, More Than Strategy
+358 50 5931394
sointu@morethan.fi
Akseli Koskela
Director, Foresight and Preparedness, Technology Industries of Finland
+358 44 2771780
akseli.koskela@teknologiateollisuus.fi
