According to the EU’s climate and energy package, Finland is expected to increase its share of renewable sources from the present 28 per cent to 38 per cent of energy production by 2020. Fulfilling this obligation require a significant increase in Finland’s use of wood-based energy, waste fuels, heat pumps, biogas and wind energy during next years.
This is no easy feat, especially given the rather modest Finnish feed in tariffs in the sector (premium tariffs and investment subsidies amont annually to roughly € 30 million). Nevertheless, the market can be potentially really really big and the need is dire. We’ve already seen some groundbreaking news surface this week in cleantech sector from the US. But make no mistake, Silicon Valley is not the only place where cleantech blossoms. Far from it. This week Wärtsilä came out with news that the world’s first solid oxide fuel cell unit, running on landfill gas, has successfully concluded the first phase of its validation programme.
We’ve been looking closely at the startup scene in the Nordics and Baltics for the last two and a half years and I have to say, the amount of events on the market these days is very attractive. There are a lot of different kind of events and I’m sure there’s something for everyone. While these events have their own functions and drive their own agendas, there’s no getting round it – they’re great fun and will surely improve your business if not by any other means than at least by networking with the other visitors there.
Are Nordic countries particularly entrepreneurial? How do our societies perceive entrepreneurship as a career choice?
Guilty as charged. We sometimes need a helping hand from a copy editor here and there, because we are not native English speakers, but want to write in English just because its the global lingua franca. Now there’s 
Nikolaj Nyholm, a Danish serial entrepreneur, who stepped down as Polar Rose’s CEO 
We visited Lahti 
Electric cars are all the rage currently and in many ways its also the holy grail of Detroit and thus plays a disproportionately large role in the US politics. To get an idea of how big a role cars alone play, the federal program paid individual car owners up to $4,500 to replace their current vehicles with new ones that get higher-mileage. Whether this was just an indirect subsidy to Detroit or a real environmentally responsible policy is another discussion.
Over the years, as I have worked with several great designers, I have come to appreciate well designed info graphics more and more. At the same time, where I’m not that much of a designer myself but why I can help companies with their products’ user experience is because I am one of the most impatient persons you’ll ever meet when it comes to bad user interfaces – If I don’t figure out right away what’s happening with a given product, the interface is broken as far as I’m concerned. These two reasons added to the fact that I love big data go a long way explaining why I like 
Biovakka Suomi Oy 
Bitbar
