Guests from Washington, D.C.
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Peter Corbett
To his surprise, Peter Corbett discovered in Helsinki a very Finnish-focused technology innovation community. Meeting with more than 50 technology community members, from people running start -ups, to people at Forum Virium, he encountered intelligent and creative engineers, but missing was the global vision for technology innovation he expected that so defines the U.S. startup community. “The Finnish startups I met all said they wanted everyone in Finland to use their service. I got to thinking, that’s kind of odd; there are five million people in Finland. When someone builds a technology company in the U.S., they say I want the entire world to use my service. I thought the homogeneity of the population in Finland was both a good thing and a bad thing for the country. I could see them benefiting from a broader perspective to help them break out of that mentality and bubble of thinking of Finland only.”
From their side, the Finns were intrigued with Corbett’s groundbreaking work around open government data with projects such as Apps for Democracy, a project sourced innovation directly from talented citizen coders for the Washington, DC government, and data.gov with the Federal government “The possibilities for global impact with data.gov are immense. If we can show countries around the world that the U.S. federal government can open up their data, other countries probably can too.” Corbett was thrilled to learn that in the month after he left Helsinki, the team at Forum Virium began working with the city CTO to create an Apps for Finland innovation contest. “It was really gratifying to see Finland creating programs focused on changing the way government procures IT. “
Traveling to Helsinki, Corbett was looking for opportunities to take what his company iStrategy Labs does in DC, New York, and San Francisco and bring that innovation to Helsinki. “I’d love to create a very lightweight lab basically in Helsinki and it’s a matter of having a client first out there and I know there are certainly some right people I met who could be those people.” To that end, he hopes to explore possible collaborations with Jarmo Eskelinen and Forum Virium to form that bridge to Helsinki, and create iStrategy’s first reach beyond the U.S. “I would love Helsinki to be our first international location.”
In May the Embassy of Finland hosted Corbett and a group of 300 from Washington’s new technology community to meet with key Helsinki innovators. “We totally filled the place, you could say. We saw presentations about what’s going on in Helsinki and I spoke about my experience there. The event was such an interesting way for me to bring the DC technology community into the fold with regard to how I think Finnish innovation works. “