Sitra – the Finnish Innovation Fund promotes the welfare of Finnish society with fixed term programmes. The programmes aim to provide a quick response to critical issues regarding the competitiveness and economic growth of Finland.

Sitra wanted to use digital tools during the preparatory stage of the Landmarks (Maamerkit in Finnish) programme to broaden it’s contacts with key stakeholders in government, research and business and to gain valuable insights from stakeholders that might not otherwise be able to voice their opinion.

Due to the complexity and broad scope of the issue at hand, the four month long online workshop was divided into to three distinct phases, each covering the topic from a different viewpoint. Previous experience had also shown us that emphasis should be put on contacting the right people and presenting them with a clear task. One that would be wide enough to keep participants open-minded and at the same time provide the Sitra team with insights that they were looking for.

Insights from offline workshops held at key cities were combined with the insights gathered online and used in planning the programme roadmap and the range of methods used during the programme. Sitra plans to continue developing the site and add more crowdsourcing tools to use in its programmes.

Personal comments:

Ripatti: “I was amazed at how many people participated and how much activity and fresh ideas we got on such a difficult and complex subject. Seems to me that our approach to crowdsourcing works very well”