A know-how concentration generating new companies has been created at Otaniemi in Espoo during the past decade. The strong areas of the Science Park are the software businesses and information technology. The business idea of the technology centre is to help new state-of-the-art business activities to start, grow and internationalize. The number of companies has risen to 400 and every year almost one hundred new ones are created.

The operating environment at Otaniemi: the tight network of universities, corporate incubators and business accelerators, such as at Innopoli and the Science and Technology Park at Otaniemi, is a good substrate for innovations and international technology companies.

Science Park 'Club of Excellence'

The technology centre and incubator operations are top class in Finland and developing quickly all the time. In particular, Innopoli, which is created from new technology companies, and the Science and Technology Park at Otaniemi have been performing a great deal of pioneering work, even in European terms, and the area these days is the biggest concentration of small and start-up technology companies in Europe.

Otaniemi/Uusimaa was the only Finnish science community to gain access to the 'Club of Excellence' when the European Commission awarded it 'The Award of Excellence for Innovative Regions' prize for being an environment that supports innovations. The Otaniemi community includes the Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT), the Foundation for Finnish Inventions, the Centre for Scientific Computing, the Geological Survey of Finland and KCL, the forest industry's central laboratory. The research centres and companies on the campus employ more than 8,000 highly-skilled professionals, and there are 14,000 students at the university of technology. The City of Espoo plays an active role in Otaniemi's technology concentration.

Efficiency on the networks

In addition to start-up companies, Innopoli is also the home of the development units of big companies, the units of scientific institutions and companies that have internationalized - and they already form a major cooperation and customer network among themselves. Innopoli also networks globally with organizations that have the same objectives, the most basic being the promotion of customer companies' business. At Innopoli companies are offered not only basic services but also useful peripheral services: marketing and management consultation, financing and administrative services such corporate development programmes.

In 2001 almost 100 companies took part in the development programmes of Spinno (Spinno Business Development Centre), which produces corporate development services at Innopoli. The programmes are implemented both in Finland and abroad, and they include activities such as seminars and workshops, legal advice, specialist panel and mentor work, financial advice, networking gatherings, and studies on a sector-by-sector and company-by-company basis.

Ideas turned into products

Transferring science institutes' know-how to companies for the latter to use is, as is well known, a major challenge for product development. Operating as a commercial catalyst is natural for Innopoli. Almost 40% of the companies in the Innopoli group mention software production as being an important operating area. Innopoli 2, is a conspicuous landmark in the software business. Also located there are the professorship in the field and a research laboratory in addition to a corporate incubator.

Codetoys, which produces mobile entertainment services, is an example of a company that was created and given an infrastructure under Innopoli's wing. There are many operators in the same sector in the park and suitable training for the entrepreneur can be found there. Codetoys founding couple went through the SPINNO training programme at Innopoli. Companies consider the most important point to be the community atmosphere, in which everybody is 'in the same boat'. Codetoys was established in 1998, and at that time it employed just the founding pair. In the autumn of 2002 it employed more than 80 people, and the company has just been listed among the 25 most promising European technology companies in the Tornado Insider's 100 corporate listing.

The 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire?' mobile game is Codetoys best-known product. Codetoys' mobile games are available to over 250 million consumers, making them the most widely available mobile games in the world.

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