Futures of Education — a workshop pilot for Helsinki-region innovation

Futures of Education — a workshop pilot for Helsinki-region innovation

Piloting a futures workshop for growth companies at the edge of education and technology.

Piloting a futures workshop for growth companies at the edge of education and technology.

HEVi — Helsinki+Vantaa+Espoo Innovations — is a platform for new growth and co-creation in the capital region. It brings together companies, cities, and institutions around themes where innovation is both needed and possible. Education is one of those themes. In early 2023, we worked with HEVi to design and run a futures workshop focused on new learning environments and EdTech solutions. The participants were growth companies operating in and around the education sector — people who live with the opportunities and pressures of the space every day. The pilot was successful. Based on the results, a series of follow-on workshops is being planned across HEVi's other focus areas.

Year

2023 –

Industry

Education

Scope of work

/

Strategic Design

Timeline

2023 –

Piloting a futures workshop for growth companies at the edge of education and technology.

HEVi — Helsinki+Vantaa+Espoo Innovations — is a platform for new growth and co-creation in the capital region. It brings together companies, cities, and institutions around themes where innovation is both needed and possible. Education is one of those themes. In early 2023, we worked with HEVi to design and run a futures workshop focused on new learning environments and EdTech solutions. The participants were growth companies operating in and around the education sector — people who live with the opportunities and pressures of the space every day. The pilot was successful. Based on the results, a series of follow-on workshops is being planned across HEVi's other focus areas.

Year

2023 –

Industry

Education

Scope of work

/

Strategic Design

Timeline

2023 –

Futures thinking as a working method

A futures workshop isn't a brainstorm. The structure matters. Participants need a framework that lets them think beyond the pressures of next quarter, without losing the grounding that makes the output useful. That's the balance we designed for. We built the workshop around three questions: what future changes are coming that will affect your business, what opportunities do those changes create, and what risks should you be planning for now? Companies worked through those questions in relation to their own context — their product, their customers, their position in the market — rather than in the abstract. The result was a room where growth companies in education were both sharpening their own strategic thinking and building relationships with each other. That peer network is part of the value of a well-run workshop — and it's something that structured facilitation can create deliberately.

The workshop format was designed to be repeatable. HEVi is now planning to roll it out across their other innovation focus areas — which means the pilot wasn't just an output, it was a template.

Building networks and shared futures

Education is a sector where the future is arriving fast and the stakeholders are many. EdTech companies, schools, municipalities, investors — each has a different vantage point on what's changing and what it means. A workshop that brings even a slice of that ecosystem together, in a structured way, does something that individual strategy work can't: it surfaces shared assumptions, competing views, and unexpected common ground. Participants shared their own business plans and directions. They got to see how others in adjacent spaces were thinking. That transparency, in a facilitated setting, tends to produce more honest and more useful strategic thinking than a room full of people presenting polished slides. The futures workshop model we piloted with HEVi is now part of our co-futuring practice — a format we can bring to other innovation platforms, industry groups, and corporate strategy teams who want to do this kind of work.

The pilot focused on new learning environments and EdTech solutions — one of HEVi's key innovation themes. The format is designed to transfer to any domain where companies are navigating significant change.

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Let’s talk.

Have a project in mind, need expert insights, or simply want to explore how we can help you? Get in touch with us today.

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Have a project in mind?

By submitting, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.

© 2026 Nordkapp

Let’s talk.

Have a project in mind, need expert insights, or simply want to explore how we can help you? Get in touch with us today.