Understanding, prioritising, and measuring impact has become increasingly important for decision makers in the public sector. For example, cities are constantly making decisions that impact people, businesses, and the environment in different and often interconnected ways. We support public sector organisations in finding and implementing the tools needed for sustainable and future-proof decisions.
Key facts
We help our customers formulate a systematicic and comprehensive approach to societal, economic, environmental impacts by adopting leadership strategies that rely on relevant indicators and data. We also provide the tools to make the impact visible
Our customers benefit from VTT’s exceptional combination of expertise. Our team brings together knowhow in strategic foresight, impact assessment, modelling, data and AI, service design, and deep industry expertise ranging from energy to transportation and manufacturing.
We have worked successfully with several cities and public sector organisations, such as ministries, in helping to make future-proof decisions and leading with impact.
Guiding future-proof societal change with impact leadership - Creating sustainable leadership strategy
Tackling global challenges and enabling sustainable growth and long-term wellbeing requires changes in the socio-technical system. Local ecosystems, such as cities, are faced with major challenges as well as opportunities. To take on various societal transformations, fundamental changes are required in the prevailing management culture and mind-sets.
Focus needs to be put on future-oriented, systematic, and comprehensive leadership approaches to support impact-driven decisions and policies.
What is impact leadership?
At VTT, we see impact leadership as a method to build sophisticated and evidence-based approach to decision making to ensure sustainable and future-proof decisions. This often signifies a shift from other decision-making priorities to an emphasis on understanding and assessing societal, economic, and environmental impacts. Through impact leadership, we can give organisations tools to confront different societal transformations and phenomena supported by jointly set strategic targets, comprehensive impact indicators, good quality data, strong cooperation between stakeholders, and a comprehensive understanding of the potential impact of different scenarios.
VTT’s impact leadership combines vision building and foresight, comprehensive and systemic approach to impact and systematic use of data and modelling for better decisions and proactive policies.
Sustainable cities make proactive decisions
Cities and other public sector organisations have an important role in making decisions that affect the function and wellbeing of our society in many complex and often interconnected ways. With many concurrent transformations – from demographic changes to digitalisation and combatting climate change, each decision can impact different groups differently and at different time.
Case: VTT supports city of Espoo in harnessing impact leadership for sustainability
Tackling sustainability challenges requires changes in the public sector roles, operation models and legislation. Espoo community is a forerunner with a vision of becoming a platform for local innovation and business ecosystems. Together, the city of Espoo and VTT generated a concrete solution to turn challenges into opportunities for sustainable growth by developing a comprehensive and holistic impact evaluation framework and identifying key performance indicators (KPI) to support the strategic target setting and management towards future proof city.
How we did it?
- Comprehensive impact framework and KPIs to support strategic management
- Participatory process to set common targets for city management
- Actionable roadmap to support implementation
In excellent and inspiring co-operation with VTT, we succeeded in finding paths and solutions that strengthen future proof and sustainable way of leading city.
Historically, decision making in cities has focused primarily on budget considerations, which, in the worst case, has led to short-sighted policies with unintended consequences. With our expertise and methodology, we can support cities in developing and implementing impact-driven leadership strategies and adopt practices that assess and balance the different societal, economic, and environmental impacts.
To learn more about VTT’s work with future-proof cities, you can read more about our VTT CityTune toolkit for holistic urban planning.
New approaches and concrete support for public sector decision making
We work with different public sector organisations and municipalities with a range of different goals and challenges. Our services always combine a long-term vision and systemic approach to co-creation, but the way we carry out projects depends on the individual needs of each customer. We can either tackle pre-defined challenges together or be your partner in identifying and mapping out comprehensive impact targets and choose the right service models and tools.
We can support you in:
- Building a sustainable future and a flexible strategy
- Creating a future vision and roadmap with concrete actions
- Managing change in culture and ways of working
- Growing new knowhow and capabilities
- Data utilisation and value creation models and concepting
- Verifying and tracking the impact of decisions and operations
- Reviewing old business models.
Everything we do is based on a big-picture understanding and collaborative methods, but in the end, we want to make sure that each project provides our customers with actionable tools, models and practices that are aligned with their specific objectives and that support operationalisation and lead to change.
Ability to identify and utilise the correct type of suitable and timely data defines the success of high impact organisational actions. Our holistic and modelling-based approaches to data value creation provides value for even the most complex environments. We help our customers do this with concrete and efficient steps and tools with clear, measurable impact.
The resulting processes allow more balanced and evidence-driven decision making and transparency among all stakeholder and end-user groups.
Case: Strategic impact framework guides public procurements at Finland’s Ministry of Finance
Ministry of Finance and Procurement Finland Programme wanted to make Finland a pioneer in innovative and responsible public procurements. Together, we created a comprehensive impact framework and related strategic indicators that enable the long-term target setting and management of sustainable and impactful procurements.
VTT’s expertise and reputation were crucial in identifying the impact indicators and increasing their credibility. The VTT experts’ approach to work was highly professional and the collaboration was smooth, which creates a solid base for future collaboration.
Meet our experts
Our impact leadership services build on VTT’s unique, multidisciplinary research competences. We collaborate closely with VTT’s design -team which ensures a highly professional conceptualisation of the result.
Kirsi has 20 years of experience in research, technology and innovation policy research. She is leading the Future-proof Societies team at VTT which supports decision-makers to have concrete means to understand future needs, design proactive policies, and to analyse their impacts in the field of innovation and sustainable society.
Kalle works as a Vice President, Foresight and Data Economy at VTT. He has wide experience and a strong track-record in technology management and growth strategies in various sectors.
Katri works as a Research Manager at VTT within the research area of Foresight and Data Economy. She has over 20 years’ experience on both research and practical development work regarding business networks, ecosystems and collaboration models.
Peter is a Principal Scientist and works as a Lead at Foresight and Data Economy research area. His area of interest is modelling, simulation, optimization, analysis and re-engineering of technological, social, cognitive and business processes. He is the product owner of VTT CityTune® used in impact assessment and solving complex challenges.
Riina has 25 years’ experience of telecom, B2B professional services, platform-, data- and cloud-based solutions from various corporate environment roles. She with her team helps organisations to harness the data capital and develop cross-sectoral value networks to improve societal resiliency.
Key publications
How to work with us
We build each case to respond to the individual needs of our customer organisations. Our modular approach allows us to tailor solutions that can support you either in tackling a pre-defined challenge, or act as a strategic partner from current-state assessment all the way to implementation of new practices. Get in touch with us to discuss how our impact leadership teams can support you.
Our impact leadership model offers:
- Concrete support
- Comprehensive view to sustainability and impacts
- Better indicators
- “Management dashboard”
- Active tools to support everyday steering
