The Age of Radical Thinking Begins Now.
A business-driven platform for turning AI's superpowers into new products, services, and customer value — through cross-industry collaboration and fair-trade co-creation with universities and startups.
Ecosystem launch at the Business Finland Gen AI Event.
Join us for the official launch of RAIDE — Finland's new cross-industry innovation cluster for turning AI's superpowers into real products, services, and growth.
Hosted by Business Finland · Strategic partner of the RAIDE ecosystem.Why this ecosystem is critical right now.
AI is reshaping entire industries at unprecedented speed. When creation and rebuilding become faster, the competitive edge shifts: deeper insights, quality strategic thinking, and the ability to apply technology become decisive. The organisations and nations that combine bold vision with the best thinking will define the next era.
The gap between leaders and followers is widening — fast.
This is not a moment for incremental optimisation. Efficiency gains alone won't close the gap. What's needed is radical thinking: bold moves to build entirely new AI-native products and services that create real value for customers. Turning disruption into opportunity requires looking beyond what AI can automate, and toward what it can create.
Cross-industry co-creation is Finland's underutilised superpower.
Finland is a trust society. Our leading corporations operate in complementary domains — energy, maritime, industrial technology, public services. This is a structural advantage most countries can only dream of. When combined with public-sector participation, it opens world-class opportunities to co-create with the global market in sight. RAIDE activates it.
Top talent matters more than ever — and we have to cultivate it.
In the AI era, the quality and ambition of your talent pool may be the single most decisive competitive factor. We need to engage with universities not just to recruit, but to challenge the next generation intellectually enough to develop world-class capability. Real, ambitious projects are how we make the Finnish ecosystem stronger than ever before.
This industrial revolution is transforming value chains and reshaping our society at a scale we haven't seen before. No single organisation, however large or capable, can navigate this alone. That's why we have decided to join forces: R&D-intensive companies and public organisations, coming together to accelerate Finland's transition to one of the leading countries applying AI in radical ways to build new business and user value.
And we want to do this in a way where the work doesn't only benefit the participating organisations themselves, but the broader ecosystem as well. The other partners, universities, and the startup scene all get stronger. Large corporations need a thriving university and startup ecosystem around them to succeed in the long run. And vice versa. RAIDE is built on this conviction.
Two pillars. One integrated engine.
RAIDE works because the two mechanisms reinforce each other. Cross-industry collaboration generates the real challenges and priorities. Professionally managed co-creation with universities and startups brings fresh talent, research, and solutions. Results flow back to partners — and the cycle accelerates.
Cross-industry collaboration
R&D-intensive companies and public organisations working together across sector boundaries to identify, understand, create, and deploy AI-powered products and services.
Identify & prioritise
Strategic opportunities and problems surfaced from partner organisations. Real problems, real stakes, real urgency.
Understand
Active expert participation in Pillar 02 co-creation. Building cumulative understanding and dealflow of collaborations.
Interpret & create new IPR
Combining insights and ideas from experiments. Pairing enablers with contexts to find new applications from customer needs.
Deploy
Feeding partners' R&D portfolios, launching collaborative R&D projects, creating new ventures with startups.
Fair-trade co-creation
With universities, talents and startups. Structured, professionally managed pathways that bring fresh perspectives and ambitious teams into partner challenges.
Innovation projects with universities
Multidisciplinary teams tackling real partner challenges through project courses and development sprints. Quality topics that universities actually want.
RAIDE thesis programme
Enterprise-quality master's thesis topics with real data, mentoring, and direct connections to partner R&D teams and leading professors.
Pre-pilots with startups
Structured validation of startup solutions against real partner needs. From scouting to proof-of-concept with actual decision-makers involved.
Joint R&D
Direct connections between active professors and partner R&D teams for funded research consortia.
RAIDE Core Partners
The real competitive edge comes from combining perspectives across industries. An AI solution identified in maritime logistics may transform healthcare operations — but only if the right people are in the same room.
— Core principle of the RAIDE ecosystemWhat we do together.
RAIDE is built as a platform model. The ideas are radical. What is truly radical, though, is the collaboration model behind them. We are not trying to gather a long list of partners with shallow involvement. We are assembling a smaller group of selected, deeply engaged organisations — ones committed to the kind of results and impact that only emerge when serious players work together.
Reorganising open innovation — from one-off projects to ongoing collaboration.
RAIDE reshapes how collaboration happens. It connects the right experts at partner organisations with the right university professors, student talent, and startup founders — brought together by Demola alongside accelerators and academic partners. The result is a continuous working relationship where the right people meet around the right questions, again and again.
Who · What · WhenIndustries, universities, and startups — deliberately mixed across sectors.
RAIDE brings together perspectives that rarely meet in the same room: leaders from complementary industries, researchers from different fields, and founders building in adjacent spaces. The mix is the method. It is what sharpens a use case, reframes a problem, and makes a solution transferable beyond a single domain.
Multidisciplinary · Multi-sectorA new level of partner-to-partner co-creation.
Trust between Finnish organisations is a structural advantage that few ecosystems can replicate. RAIDE makes it operational — a confidential, peer-grade setting where complementary industry leaders can focus on the same questions, share what matters, and reach further together than any bilateral arrangement would allow.
Trust society · Partner co-creation“Fair-trade” co-creation that benefits everyone.
RAIDE creates genuine value exchange — not extraction. Universities get quality topics and research data. Startups get structured enterprise access. Talents get career-defining projects. Partners get fresh perspectives and next-generation innovation.
Universities and startups aren't suppliers. They're co-creators whose insights are needed when accelerating more radical concepts, products and services. That's why we wanted to develop collaboration mechanisms that benefit everyone.
— Ecosystem design philosophyWhat RAIDE offers universities
A continuous stream of high-quality, industry-relevant collaboration opportunities.
- Real challenges from leading organisations as project topics for courses and project-based learning
- Direct connections between active professors and partner R&D teams for joint research
- A significant-volume testbed for studying AI-powered product and service development
- Cumulative insights and data from co-creation projects to fuel academic research
What RAIDE offers startups
Access to co-create with key people from RAIDE partners through structured pathways — not just pitch events.
- Matching to validated enterprise needs, not generic networking
- Showcases in front of actual decision-makers from partner organisations
- Clear pre-pilot and proof-of-concept pathways with committed partners
- New startups emerging from Demola projects with built-in enterprise connections
Powered by Demola Global.
Demola is an industry-driven innovation and collaboration platform initiated by Nokia in 2008. The objective: build a scalable collaboration model that leverages next-generation insights in experimental projects exploring technology use cases and the specifications of new products and services.
Demola Global is an expert organisation with a team having over 10 years of global experience in corporate-university-startup collaboration across more than 40 countries and over 7,000 projects. In 2024 we decided to focus increasingly on our home ecosystem — Finland — to accelerate economic and creative renewal.
In RAIDE, we directly utilise our digital and data platforms, cumulative knowledge base, IPR and contract management practices, and facilitation expertise.
Learn more at demola.netCreating broad and lasting impact.
RAIDE drives transformation across the Finnish innovation landscape — from accelerated corporate renewal to new export-ready solutions.
Accelerated innovation & renewal
Shared product and service concept development across industries dramatically increases AI adoption speed and creates a clear path from idea to production.
Industry–academia bridge
Scalable mechanisms for concrete cooperation, from project courses and thesis work to joint R&D consortia with leading professors.
Finland as AI applicator
With leading export companies in the ecosystem, the impact on new business creation, international competitiveness, and growth is direct.
Startup ecosystem growth
Structured enterprise–startup interfaces, PoC pathways, and new company formation from project teams accelerate the ecosystem.
Working alongside Finland's AI landscape.
RAIDE complements Finland's AI landscape by filling the gap for a business-driven innovation cluster focused on application and co-creation. We collaborate with ecosystem partners who bring complementary strengths.
Who are RAIDE Partners?
The ecosystem is open to all organisations committed to its goals — from leading exporters and public-sector innovators to agile scale-ups. A Management Board comprising partner representatives approves new partners.
Large enterprises
Leading Finnish export companies serve as the ecosystem's core anchors — driving cross-industry use case identification, participating in deep-dive co-development, and creating demand for new solutions and R&D collaboration.
Public organisations & mid-caps
Cities, wellbeing regions, and mid-sized companies bring diverse AI application opportunities, offer concrete test environments, and participate in defining innovative public procurement approaches.
Scale-ups & SMEs
Smaller companies contribute specialised expertise and gain access to cross-industry R&D collaboration, university partnerships, enterprise co-creation opportunities, and the ecosystem's cumulative knowledge base.
Talk to us.
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Make Finland a role model in AI application.
By acting now, we ensure Finland doesn't just adapt to the AI era — but becomes one of its leading architects and beneficiaries. RAIDE launches on May 26th at the Business Finland Gen AI event. Join us.