AVANTO - Conversations on Finland's Global Ambition

Geoffroy Van Humbeeck
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Finland has world-class engineers, trusted institutions, and a growing startup ecosystem. And yet it still struggles to build companies that shape the world on its own terms. AVANTO asks why — and what it would take to change that. Through long-form conversations with founders, investors, policymakers and international observers, it builds a structured, honest account of what Finland's ecosystem actually looks like from the inside.

  1. Aug 31

    Marit af Björkesten - The Common Ground

    Episode 13 · The Common Ground Marit af Björkesten, CEO of Yle When Yle was created in 1926, its mission included building bridges between people, and between the countryside and the cities, in a country still divided by war and distance. A century later, Marit af Björkesten argues that the same mission has returned in a different form: preserving common ground when the shared front page has disappeared and every person enters through a different feed. In this episode, Marit joins AVANTO to discuss trust, fragmented media consumption and what public service becomes when personalisation is unavoidable but editorial judgement remains essential. We explore how Yle is developing an algorithm that combines audience behaviour with journalistic decisions, why certain national and international developments must still be brought to everyone, and what Finland could lose if younger audiences spend their time on global platforms without encountering Finnish news, culture or stories. Marit also draws a clear boundary between journalism and national promotion. Journalism is not there to market Finland or advance growth. Its contribution is to remain independent, question inherited narratives and examine working solutions with the same seriousness applied to failure. Constructive journalism, she argues, is not the same as positive journalism. We then discuss news avoidance, young people’s connection to society and the role culture, documentaries and other formats can play when audiences no longer want to enter important subjects through news alone. Finally, Marit reflects on leading Yle through a €66 million adjustment over 2025–2027, the priorities this has forced the organisation to make, and why digital distribution has become inseparable from the public-service mission. AVANTO is a long-form conversation series about Finland’s global ambition.

    Marit af Björkesten - The Common Ground

  2. Aug 29

    Jukka Maksimainen - The Growth Pipeline

    Jukka Maksimainen, Senior Partner and Managing Partner, Nordics at McKinsey & Company Finnish companies often approach investment with the expectation that every decision should succeed. Jukka Maksimainen argues for a different logic: if the ambition is to grow by 8 percent, the initiative pipeline should promise 11 or 12, because something will inevitably be delayed, underperform or fail. In this episode, Jukka joins AVANTO to discuss growth ambition, capital allocation and what has changed since McKinsey published Seizing Finland’s Growth Opportunity in August 2025. Drawing on research into Finland’s twenty largest listed companies, we explore why they grew by 3 percent annually over the decade studied, against 8 percent among global peers, how modest growth targets and lower investment in R&D, capital expenditure and M&A reinforce one another, and what Swedish companies approach differently. We also look at the movement since publication: a quarter of the companies studied have raised their growth targets, bringing the average close to 5 percent. We then apply the same portfolio logic to Finland’s industrial opportunity: why only 20 to 30 percent of projects at pre-feasibility stage are eventually built, how Finland can improve those odds, and why a strong technical case can still lose at the margin when another location is more familiar to international investors. Finally, we discuss what makes Finland unusually competitive in energy-intensive industries, and how cost-competitive clean electricity, available land and fast time to power could be converted into lasting industrial value.

    Jukka Maksimainen - The Growth Pipeline

  3. Aug 25

    Lari Hintsanen - The Opportunity Map

    Lari Hintsanen, CEO of Deloitte Finland Finnish companies are exceptionally good at identifying and preparing for risk. But where is the opportunity map? In this episode, Lari Hintsanen, CEO of Deloitte Finland, joins AVANTO to discuss ambition, renewal and what happens when efficiency is prioritised over renewal. Drawing on Deloitte’s recent work with Demos Helsinki and his discussions with Finnish business leaders, we explore who actually sets the bar inside large companies, why risk is mapped more systematically than opportunity, and whether Finland should choose a few areas where it is prepared to “put all in.” We also discuss why corporate culture can change within a leadership cycle, and why Lari remains optimistic about Finland: the foundations are already strong. The question is how to use them to capture the next good thing.

    Lari Hintsanen - The Opportunity Map

  4. Jul 29

    Linda Liukas - On Legibility, Permission and the Audacity to Dream Big

    In this tenth episode of AVANTO, Linda Liukas speaks from Paris, where she has lived for the past five years. For more than a decade, she has been making computing legible to children.She is the author and illustrator of the Hello Ruby books, published in close to forty languages, and the co-founder of Rails Girls. She now builds playgrounds: public infrastructure that makes technology physical and is designed to last for twenty years. Across books, workshops and public spaces, her work returns to the same question: what makes people feel that a subject belongs to them, and that they are allowed to touch it, question it and build with it? The conversation asks whether the same applies to a country. Finland can be excellent and still hard to read from the outside, because much of what defines it is carried in context that outsiders do not automatically share. It moves from why adults answer a curious child with “it’s magic” or “it’s too complicated”, to the permission Linda found at Stanford to aim higher, and to the deliberate choices Finland made in the 1960s to raise its own ceiling. She names Finnish assets that rarely appear in any pitch, including an openness of access that a large country cannot afford: “In Finland you're always one email away from someone.” She also examines what Finland may have lost or undervalued along the way: an education that does not always teach people to articulate and trust their own judgement, an engineering culture built on dependability that may have lost some of its audacity, and the difficulty of making a complex country legible without flattening it into one thing. It closes on a proposition Finland has never put on the table, and on what Linda hopes for the children who first discovered Hello Ruby more than a decade ago. A long-form conversation about Finland's global ambition. Why a country with world-class technology, trusted institutions and exceptional talent still struggles to build companies that shape the world on its own terms.

    Linda Liukas - On Legibility, Permission and the Audacity to Dream Big

  5. Jul 28

    Kirsti Laasio - On Storytelling, Brand and the Courage to Scale

    In this ninth episode of AVANTO, Kirsti Laasio speaks from the operator's seat. She helped build two product categories out of Finland: the wristop computer at Suunto in 2000, and the wearable activity tracker at Polar a few years later. Those experiences taught her that being early does not automatically translate into lasting global category leadership. Kirsti is CEO of Omnigym Group and Chair of the Board of Boardman Grow, and has spent two decades scaling technology companies internationally, advising others and sitting on their boards. She takes the season's diagnosis inside the company, where ambition stops being a posture and becomes a budget line, a hiring decision and a board agenda. The conversation moves from how a category is actually created, to why Finnish modesty builds trust at home and invisibility abroad, to what a company's split between R&D, sales and marketing reveals about its real intentions. It covers brand as the most valuable asset a company holds rather than a marketing activity, why cutting marketing and customer experience first is the biggest mistake a company can make, what boards fail to challenge when a company says it wants to go global, and why the nearest market is not the easiest one. It closes on the test Kirsti applies to any founder claiming global ambition, and on the single question she would put to a Finnish CEO before investing. A long-form conversation about Finland's global ambition. Why a country with world-class technology, trusted institutions and exceptional talent still struggles to build companies that shape the world on its own terms.

    Kirsti Laasio - On Storytelling, Brand and the Courage to Scale

  6. Jun 29

    Philip Aminoff - On Openness, Exports and the Will to Prosper

    Episode 8 of AVANTO with Philip Aminoff, Chairman of Helvar Merca and Helectron. Finland is often described as cautious, inward-looking and modest in its relationship with growth. Yet in the decades before independence, it was a strikingly international economy, shaped by foreign-born professionals, entrepreneurs, investors and a strong export orientation. In this conversation, Philip Aminoff takes a long historical view of Finland’s development. We discuss the international Helsinki of a hundred and forty years ago, the role of foreign-born professionals in building parts of Finland’s industrial backbone, the culture of reinvesting profits for the long term, why Finnish listed companies often protect stable earnings instead of investing in growth, how export promotion moved from the private sector to the state, the commercial skill that was lost along the way, the disconnect between leaders and customers, over-regulation, and what it would take for Finland to want to prosper again. A conversation about openness, exports, long-term ownership and the will to recover a capacity Finland once had.

    Philip Aminoff - On Openness, Exports and the Will to Prosper

  7. Jun 21

    Atte Jääskeläinen - On Renewal, Courage and Turning Knowledge into Action

    Episode 7 of AVANTO with Atte Jääskeläinen, President of Sitra. Finland has talent, technology, strong institutions and promising companies. Yet the country has struggled to create economic growth for a long time. In this conversation, Atte Jääskeläinen explains why renewal is difficult even in a capable society. We discuss institutional change, the role of crisis, Finland’s public finances, incentives, demography, capital, distributed decision-making, and what it takes to act before change becomes unavoidable. A conversation about diagnosis, courage and the mechanisms that turn understanding into action.

    Atte Jääskeläinen - On Renewal, Courage and Turning Knowledge into Action

  8. May 7

    Ari Tulla - On Scale, Focus and Finland’s AI Bet

    In this sixth episode of AVANTO, Ari Tulla speaks from San Francisco. Ari is Co-founder and CEO of Elo Health, formerly at Nokia in Silicon Valley, founder of BetterDoctor, early investor in Oura, Verda, Donut Lab, and Verge, and LP in Lifeline Ventures and ByFounders. He brings a perspective no previous guest in the series could: he left Finland, built in Silicon Valley, and invested back into the Nordic ecosystem. The conversation starts inside Nokia. For Ari, Nokia was not beaten by lack of intelligence. It had extraordinary engineers, deep talent, and global reach. What it lacked was focus. “If you don’t focus, you will never win.” From there, the episode moves to Silicon Valley, BetterDoctor, Oura, Finnish growth capital, scale-up leadership, visibility, Donut Lab, Linear, Singapore, the Finnish Long Drink, and Ari’s boldest idea: making every Finnish citizen native with AI. His diagnosis is direct, sometimes uncomfortable, but ultimately optimistic. Finland’s problem is not that nothing works. Much of the ecosystem now works far better than Finns often admit. Capital exists at the beginning. International capital can be reached later. The country has talent, examples, institutions, and technical credibility. The problem is what comes next. Finland must build more people capable of scaling companies globally. It must become more visible. It must focus. And it must make bold national choices before other countries do. Episode 6 — Ari Tulla On Scale, Focus and Finland’s AI Bet

    Ari Tulla - On Scale, Focus and Finland’s AI Bet
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Finland has world-class engineers, trusted institutions, and a growing startup ecosystem. And yet it still struggles to build companies that shape the world on its own terms. AVANTO asks why — and what it would take to change that. Through long-form conversations with founders, investors, policymakers and international observers, it builds a structured, honest account of what Finland's ecosystem actually looks like from the inside.

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