Practical experience
Landing a job takes more than talent, it takes action. Demola gives you the chance to tackle real challenges, collaborate with others, and build proof of what you can do even when things are uncertain. By actively participating in a Demola project, you can turn your skills into competencies and concrete experience.
Partnered with Innovative Companies
Our platform, created together with leading companies and professors, connects you to real-world innovation projects. You’ll work as part of a team on an innovation and development project, guided by Demola’s expert facilitators. Participating in a project will give you practical experience and the confidence to deal with complexity in any job.
At Demola, innovation projects are built around real-world project topics co-designed with companies and public-sector organisations. If selected, you'll join an innovation team working to develop meaningful solutions that respond to validated needs.
Our projects tackle complex, relevant problems grounded in industry and societal needs. You'll work in a team to design and demo solutions, benefiting from the insights and findings of previous Demola projects. Most Demola projects last around two months, but the exact duration depends on the programme they are part of.
Each team benefits from expert guidance through coaching sessions and facilitated community events. Demola's facilitators bring years of experience in innovation and adapt their support to match your ambition and commitment. You are expected to take an active role, both individually and as a team.
You'll co-create with other teams and Demola's experts, and validate and test your solutions with real stakeholders to continuously refine your approach. High-performing teams gain access to a network of professionals from Demola's industry partners for further input and exposure.
You'll build in-demand, career-ready skills in creative problem-solving, AI-assisted innovation, project management, international collaboration, and resilience - all while working in an environment that mirrors real innovation practices.
Your team owns the outcomes created during the project. Use them in job interviews, your portfolio, a Master's thesis, or even as the foundation of a startup. In some cases, your work may also earn you academic credit (ECTS) if you are a student.
The impact
Ready to turn your skills into competence? Our claims are backed by feedback from our community of participants and alumni.
Strongly agree (49.3%)
Agree (43.6%)
Neither agree or disagree (5.3%)
Disagree (1.3%)
Strongly disagree (0.5%)
2 272 people took part in the survey.
New skills
65.6%
Valuable work experience
63.9%
New friends
51.5%
Startup ideas
34.4%
International teamwork experience
30.5%
Industry contacts
23.9%
Self-esteem
23.9%
New motivation to study
22.8%
Confidence in career choices
20.3%
Researcher contacts
17.6%
Better position in the labor market
13.5%
Other
1.5%
Based on Q4/2022 survey
If you’re currently studying at or near one of our Demola locations or partner universities, you’re welcome to join a Demola project.
In our partner cities, the projects are also open to graduates and professionals who are exploring new career paths or interested in co-creating and launching startups in the future.
Many alumni have participated in more than one Demola project – the current record is seven. For active alumni, we facilitate further development in their academic studies or future careers:
Explore or fine-tune your Master’s thesis topic through a Demola project and find a potential industry collaborator for your Master’s thesis after the project.
Develop an expert profile that highlights your project contributions, as well as innovation and interpersonal skills. Top-performing participants will have their expert profiles shared and recommended within Demola’s partner network, verifying their skills and proactive mindset.
Build on your project results, connect with like-minded teammates, and use your entrepreneurial mindset to lay the groundwork for a startup.
Get onboarded with Demola
Create a Demola profile.
Browse project in your location and apply to those that interest you.
If you get selected, confirm your seat and start the teamwork.
Apply to one or more projects today!
Oulu, RAIDE portfolio
Value Creators of Tomorrow
How might we design the onboarding and ongoing consent experience of a personal AI agent so that users genuinely understand the privacy-utility tradeoff — and make an informed, confident choice rather than a rushed or anxious one? Personal AI agents — assistants that manage calendars, messages, health data, location, and behavioural patterns on a user's behalf — become meaningfully more useful the more data they can access. This creates a structural tension: the agent's value to the user is directly proportional to the data the user is willing to share, but the decision to share is shaped by trust, perceived control, uncertainty about consequences, and the framing of the request itself. Most current AI agent onboarding handles this poorly: permissions are requested in bulk, benefits are overstated in general terms, and the actual data flows remain opaque. Users either accept everything without reading or reject everything out of caution — neither outcome serves them well. The team will research how users currently experience data permission requests in AI contexts, identify the psychological and design factors that shape their decisions, and prototype alternative onboarding and consent flows that present the tradeoff honestly and clearly. The work is service design at its core, informed by behavioural psychology and UX research. ## Goals - User research synthesis: how do different user segments currently reason about sharing personal data with AI agents? - At least two contrasting consent/onboarding design concepts, tested with representative users - A framework of design principles for transparent data-for-value communication in AI agent contexts - Prototype (interactive or documented) of a preferred onboarding flow As agentic AI moves from early adopter to mainstream, the quality of the data conversation will determine both user trust and the actual utility of the agents. Companies deploying personal AI agents — across health, productivity, finance, and consumer services — need validated design approaches. This topic is commercially relevant to any organisation building or integrating personal AI agent capabilities.
Apply by 30 Sept
Oulu, RAIDE portfolio
Value Creators of Tomorrow
Maintenance work on complex industrial equipment depends heavily on technicians knowing which component sits where, and which one to remove first. That knowledge currently lives in manuals, in the heads of senior technicians, or simply gets relearned through trial and error on site. As equipment ages and experienced staff retire, this tacit knowledge becomes harder to pass on, and field technicians lose time figuring out disassembly sequences that an expert would know instantly. A visual, interactive guide derived directly from the physical device — rather than from static manuals or generic CAD models — could close this gap quickly and cheaply, without requiring the original design files. Key questions to be answered in the project: 1. What is the minimum photo coverage and capture process needed to reconstruct a 3D model with usable segmentation quality? 2. How accurately can individual components be automatically segmented and labelled from the reconstructed model, and how much manual correction is needed? 3. Can the photogrammetry-to-interactive-guide workflow be made fast enough for practical use by field technicians? 4. What interaction model (touch, voice, AR overlay) best supports a technician navigating the exploded view hands-on during a maintenance task? 5. How well does the approach generalise across different device types and component scales? In this project we aim to... - Build a working prototype that converts photos of a physical device into a navigable 3D exploded view with selectable components. - Validate the workflow's speed and accuracy against a real maintenance scenario. - Conduct a UX evaluation with target users (field technicians) to assess usability and trust in the guidance provided.
Apply by 30 Sept
Oulu, RAIDE portfolio
Human Beings in the Modern World
A recent legislative change makes broader profiling of welfare-region clients possible. This opens a question two Finnish welfare regions are now asking: what would a more useful client segmentation look like if it moved beyond the standard demographic and diagnosis-based categories? The project would explore candidate segmentation axes that are actionable for service design and pre-emptive care — for example functional capability (physical and digital) as a segmentation dimension, and how fine-grained segmentation can become before it stops being useful. One metric raised in partner discussions is "Potential Years of Life Lost" (PYLL) as a lens for prioritising self-care support; the project could test whether it discriminates between segments in a meaningful way. In an 8-week co-creation timeframe, a team could produce: a proposed segmentation framework with two or three candidate axes; a test of that framework against sample or synthetic client data (no real personal data required at this stage); and a short assessment of which segments would most change service decisions — for instance, where pre-emptive care could be targeted differently than today. The theme is shared across two welfare regions facing the same post-legislation question, so a framework that travels between them has more value than a single-organisation one.
Apply by 30 Sept
Oulu, Prague, RAIDE portfolio
Future of Work
Background Large organisations make decisions constantly, but rarely see their consequences clearly. A choice made in sales affects operations; a change in R&D timelines ripples into HR and finance; a procurement decision reshapes logistics months later. These interdependencies are understood intuitively by experienced staff but are almost never mapped explicitly — which means that when a decision goes wrong, the causal chain is reconstructed in hindsight rather than anticipated in advance. The result is a recurring pattern: decisions that looked reasonable in isolation produce outcomes that surprise everyone 12 to 18 months later. A simulation environment that makes these interdependencies visible and explorable before commitment could fundamentally change how organisations reason about consequential choices. The "fake company" framing — using synthetic data rather than live organisational data — removes political sensitivity and lets participants experiment freely with scenarios that would be too risky or too controversial to test in reality. Problem Key questions to be answered in the project: How can the causal dependencies between organisational functions be identified and mapped reliably enough to serve as the foundation for a simulation? What level of model fidelity is needed for a simulation to produce outputs that experienced staff recognise as plausible — and what simplifications are acceptable without losing credibility? Which decision types benefit most from simulation — where is the gap between intuitive reasoning and modelled reasoning largest? How should the simulation surface uncertainty and model limitations so that users develop calibrated trust rather than over-relying on its outputs? In this project we aim to... Produce a validated dependency map of a fictional organisation by applying decision archaeology: identifying one recurring, high-stakes decision type and reconstructing its causal effects across functions through structured interviews and workshops. Build a simulation layer on top of the dependency map that allows users to run "what if" scenarios and observe how decisions in one function propagate through the organisation. Design and prototype the human-AI interaction model — how users pose scenarios, how results are presented, and how uncertainty is communicated.
Apply by 02 Oct
Oulu, Prague
Future of Work
**The Challenge** Marine crews rotate. A new captain steps aboard a vessel they've never seen before. The previous captain spent six weeks getting to know the quirks of this specific ship — which cylinder always runs slightly hot, which fuel pump is finicky, which weather the engine room copes badly with. The handover is a brief in-person walkthrough plus a stack of paperwork, and then the new captain sails. Worse: expert advice given to one crew ("your equipment is acting strange — probably because of this") often never reaches the next one. At its core this is a communication problem — how do we make sure crucial information survives the handover? Handing the new crew a 20-page report and trusting they read it is not the answer. The same failure mode exists in any shift-rotation environment, from process plants to hospital shift changes. **The Data** The briefing draws on two layers. **Static data**: what is on board — equipment inventory, engine type and surrounding subsystems, reference materials and manuals (every vessel is different: a cargo vessel and a bulk carrier may share almost nothing, so "here is where to find the manual for this system" is already valuable). **Dynamic data**: what has happened — logbook entries, alerts and incidents from navigational and automation subsystems, and known-but-not-yet-resolved issues flagged by remote experts analysing the vessel's data in the cloud. **Mission** Build a crew-handover briefing generator, in phases. Start with the static layer: compile "here is what you're taking over" — equipment, reference links, manuals — into a single structured onboarding briefing, everything in one place. Then layer in the dynamic history: compress the most important crew-relevant patterns, incidents and open expert advisories into a briefing the incoming crew will actually absorb. Design the ingestion interfaces to be document-agnostic, so nothing in the pipeline depends on maritime data standards — the same engine should brief a hospital shift as easily as a ship's crew. Test the briefing format with experienced operators for clarity, trust and adoption. **Why we suggest this** Rotating crews lose institutional knowledge at every handover. Compressed, AI-generated briefings tailored to the specific equipment a new crew is taking over solve a problem that exists in any shift-rotation industry — vessels, process plants, hospitals, security operations. Underexplored as a product area. *Project will use AI-generated synthetic operational histories; anonymised real handover/incident report examples from the partner serve as a reference for structure and content.*
Apply by 02 Oct
Oulu, Prague
Healing the Planet
**The Challenge** Industrial service providers do clever technical work to make their customers' operations more efficient — saving fuel, reducing emissions, extending equipment life. But the customer in many cases is a corporate sustainability office or a shipping company's investor relations team. They don't speak in compression ratios and exhaust gas temperatures; they speak in CO2 tonnes, ESG ratings and regulatory compliance. Today, translating engineering wins into customer-facing sustainability narratives is a slow, manual, expensive job. Can AI do it automatically and credibly? **Mission** Build a system that takes engineering-level efficiency improvements (fuel saved, emissions reduced, equipment life extended) and generates customer-facing narratives at multiple audiences: ESG report contribution, investor relations talking points, regulatory compliance evidence. Validate the narratives for accuracy with engineers and for resonance with sustainability professionals. **Why we suggest this** The translation layer between engineering metrics and customer-facing sustainability narratives is a manual cottage industry across the industrial sector. Decarbonisation services and ESG reporting are fast-growing revenue areas; the supporting communications infrastructure is not. Strong cross-portfolio applicability across any B2B sustainability services business. *Project will use AI-generated synthetic engineering improvement data and publicly available ESG reporting frameworks.*
Apply by 02 Oct
See how Demola has helped students around the world succeed in their careers and personal lives.
Master’s Degree student in Research and Innovation in Higher Education
Excellent
20/04/2023
“I enjoy connecting with other people who are not from the same area and field, and creating new things. I think Demola is a very great platform and, since I’m interested in education, I think this is a great idea to help students and other people to learn in a different way and to be closer to the work life.”
Master’s Student in Public and Global Health
Excellent
20/04/2023
“I joined Demola for the third time already, since I enjoy how my personal skills are developing here and I love the feeling of freedom of thoughts, to be able to think, feel and express anything.”
Master’s Student in Sustainable Digitalisation
Excellent
20/04/2023
“I wanted more experience in interdisciplinary project work and real-life, tangible development of solutions with external stakeholders. I also wanted to practice what the design process is like in the real world and how to present novel ideas in an attractive, business- oriented way. And Demola delivered!”
Master’s Degree Student in Engineering and Technology
Excellent
10/06/2022
“In Demola we focused on creating solutions that can and should be applicable and should happen in real life, concrete and implementable solutions that can have an impact. Those type of solutions that go way beyond than just making a new website or a nice social media page.”
Master of Business
Excellent
17/04/2023
“If you have successfully completed the Demola project, it is proof of your passion and that your mindset is inevitably customer-oriented. Demola is definitely an experience I can recommend to all students.”
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