AVANTO - Conversations on Finland's Global Ambition

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 take...

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, incen...

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 th...

Jarmo Sareva is the Consul General of Finland in New York and former Ambassador for Innovation. From New York — the city where global capital decides what to look at and what to overlook — he describes how Finland is read from the outside, and what that view reveals about the country itself. Reputation is real, but limited. Finnish modesty has a cost in the global market. Reliability is a virtue a...

Most people assume Brussels is a closed system. That the big countries set the rules, and everyone else follows. Petri Lahesmaa has spent more than 25 years inside those institutions. And his view is different. Small countries can move faster. Alliances matter more than size. And the door is open — if you walk through it with data, with solutions, and with something to show. The problem is that Fi...

Johannes Korpela sees it every day. The talent is there. The founders are there. The ambition is there. But if you work as hard as a top athlete to build a company, it isn't always recognized. He is CEO of Wave Ventures and co-founder of Founders House Helsinki. He spends his days with founders trying to build global companies — and sees how things actuallyplay out in practice. Not in theory. On t...

In Episode 1, Pauli Heikkilä argued that Finland’s difficulty building globally dominant companies may be largely cultural. In this second conversation, venture capitalist Mikko Suonenlahti offers a different perspective. After five decades inside companies, venture funds and boardrooms, his diagnosis is more structural. Finland produces excellent engineers. Early-stage capital exists. But the sys...

In this first episode of AVANTO, a podcast on Finland’s global competitiveness, Geoffroy Van Humbeeck speaks with Pauli Heikkilä, former CEO of Finnvera — Finland’s national promotional bank and export credit agency. Drawing on more than two decades at the heart of Finland’s innovation and financing ecosystem, Heikkilä reflects on the structural and cultural factors that shape how Finnish companie...