Finland Times

HILLA is intended as a new agile growth engine to create scalable products, services and businesses for the global markets in our future hyper-connected societies.

Hilla is a 5-year special joint national effort of Tekes, the University of Oulu, VTT, the Oulu University of Applied Sciences, Business Oulu, and growth-eligible companies from ICT and pre-selected industries.

This Tekes-funded programme focuses on growth industries whose success benefits or is enabled by ICT technologies and is aimed at accelerating ICT utilization within industries.

The main goal of HILLA is to create new growth for companies within Finland. HILLA brings a unique new model to (a) accelerate research to business, (b) efficiently utilize the ICT and industry knowledge and resourcing and (c) build market driven operations model between participants.

HILLA equips eligible stakeholders with the following tools and assets: 

                     - Co-creative ideation of new business opportunities.

                     - Research and technology resourcing.

                     - Business sparring and partnering.

                     - Projectization and managed services.

                     - Customer and showcase events.

                     - Shared R&D environments and tools.

Participation is open for all growth driven companies and stakeholders with expertise in HILLA focus areas.

HILLA resourcing and funding model is new. Planning takes place in HILLA Growth Mill, where eligible company-led spearhead projects will be equipped by jointly planned resourcing from participating research organizations and shared R&D infrastructure investments.

Funding approvals will be done by Tekes, for companies and by HILLA team with Tekes for complementary resourcing.

Top-line target of HILLA is to invest in raising industrial sectors, whose growth is either dependent or greatly benefitted by the extensive utilization of ICT. More precisely, HILLA accelerates the creation and commercialization of wireless, knowledge and data intensive smart products and solutions – the core research and development competencies of Finnish and Oulu ICT Hub.

Hilla has two main goals:

The first goal is to pilot, create and develop a new agile, industry demand-driven model that is able to accelerate research to business (leverage and differentiation), to create a setting where companies can better complement each other (new business models) and utilize the outcomes of research in a more market-focused way (speed of innovation deployment, identification of markets, customers and channels).

The second goal is to create and invest in execution-driven, market-savvy spearhead projects by deeper integration of value-adding research, smart specialization of companies and high-technology assets that combined are able to produce competitive offerings to global markets and extract value to all participants in the forms of growth, revenue and relevant innovations.

Hilla treats all efforts (e.g. expertise, know-how, assets & tools, operating models, ways of working) as a chain of networked investments that are pre-planned, measured and aimed to bring higher returns to its participants in a much faster pace than before.