Unlocking human agency.

The city wanted to know how well its existing support actually reaches young people. The work was commissioned under the Yritysten ja yrittäjyyden Espoo development programme, benefit goal 4: that every young person in Espoo gets the capability and the spark for entrepreneurship.

I designed the research and ran it over one summer: stakeholder interviews, conversations with young people, a survey, and the synthesis into a report for the city. Over 50 interviews went into the project, counting the conversations that built the partnerships as well as the ones that became data.

The stakeholder interviews followed the path a young person might take, from primary school and Yrityskylä through vocational and upper secondary education, universities and startup programmes, to incubators, employment services and youth work, across Espoo, Helsinki and Vantaa.

The sample had to include the young people no programme had reached yet.

So the youth interviews happened where young people are in summer: Sello, Iso Omena, Oodi, Otaniemi and Entresse, in pairs and small groups, with a few by video call. The report keeps its levels of evidence apart, from our own data and practitioners’ observations to national data, research literature and the interpretation built on them, and it states the limits of its sample up front.

Young people who are interested in entrepreneurship need access to people as much as to information. We built the pilot end to end: the concept, mentor recruitment and matching, onboarding, mentor training and support materials, and the three touchpoints that hold a term together.

I introduced the program to students at Lauttasaaren yhteiskoulu in March, ran onboarding in June, and the kickoff was done together with the Finnish SUP and Surf Federation.

Problem Day, Lauttasaaren yhteiskoulu, August 2026. A six-hour workshop on finding and validating problems, run with Aveksana for 25 students in eight teams. One loop: expand, sharpen, test, kill. Teams took their problems out of the building and interviewed at least five people who were not classmates.

Killing an idea does not send you back to the start. It puts you ahead of everyone who never went far enough to notice theirs was dead.

Activation workshop, Etu-Töölön lukio, September 2026. Two 75-minute sessions for 102 students on the NY Vuosi Yrittäjänä course, run with a co-facilitator in parallel rooms. It rests on one finding: people systematically misjudge what others think of them, and always in the same direction. Students wrote a real request and guessed how many people would say yes on Tuesday, then counted the actual answers on Thursday. They produced the research result before they saw the published one.

What I measure on both days is the change in how students think. The output produced in the room is beside the point.

A 48-hour design sprint with teams from several disciplines, built around a challenge from AstraZeneca and Nordic Healthcare Group on care for people living with COPD. I owned the partner relationship and the challenge development: worked with AstraZeneca's medical scientific advisor and NHG to shape a problem statement that would hold for a full sprint, then coordinated stakeholders, mentors, participant composition, marketing materials, logistics and the delivery itself.