Building Foundations: navigating complex problems with clarity and action.
How Turku City used innovation methods to build knowledge and shape opportunities for their employment services renewal.
Challenge: Turku’s renewal of their employment services is part of Finland’s Employment Services Reform of 2025, and posed a significant challenge: how to design customer-oriented services that balance regional collaboration and limited resources.
Approach: Turku adopted new methods to gain a deeper understanding of the challenge through an internal initiative called the Innovation Track, which was informed by the city’s training in the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative. The employment services team focused on uncovering insights, and translating those insights into actionable opportunities in the form of new prototypes to test, and a portfolio of initiatives designed to address the needs of residents and create opportunities for continuous development.
Outcome: by engaging with diverse stakeholders: service providers, companies, and job seekers, the team developed a deeper, human-centred understanding of the challenge. It helped the team tailor innovation methods to their specific challenge, enabling them to create actionable prototypes and assemble a portfolio of initiatives. These outcomes aim to make employment services more effective, inclusive, and tailored to the needs of Turku’s residents and the surrounding municipalities.
Discover more about the process, the insights uncovered, and the aspirations for the future by reading further below.
A team member shared this reflection after our initial workshop with Turku’s employment services on a grey, misty day. As an innovation coach, I guide teams through complex challenges to find meaningful solutions. While the legally required employment services offered a clear framework, there was a wide spectrum of opportunities to explore.
The abundance of possibilities can initially be overwhelming, making it hard for teams to decide where to start. When outcomes are uncertain, new tools are essential to help clarify the problems and potential scenarios.
The Finnish employment services reform: The 2025 reform transfers employment services from state agencies to municipalities, empowering key cities such as Turku to design services that are tailored to local needs.
Hosting 23 municipalities, Turku encountered both challenges and opportunities: creating customer-focused services for diverse groups, boosting regional appeal for businesses and workers, and aligning employment services with broader development goals. The Finnish concept of asiakas (customer) became central, broadening the city’s role in economic development beyond just assisting job seekers
Why innovate employment services? Employment services face major hurdles: limited data on customer needs and service effectiveness, poor systems for tracking outcomes, and increasing financial pressures on municipalities.
With funding cuts and greater responsibilities, cities like Turku need to optimise resources and design services that address these issues. The Innovation Track, inspired by Turku’s participation in the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, provided a structured method to explore solutions and build capabilities to tackle these complex problems.
A shift in perspective: The project was aimed at creating a space for exploring possibilities and identifying practical approaches to prototype and test. This required the team to change their mindset, as reflected in their own statements:
- “We need time, space, and resources to be creative and explore new direction.”
- “Our work needs to focus on real improvements, not only meeting political goals.”
- “Progress begins with asking the right questions and creating the freedom to explore answers.”
Formulating opportunities: The discovery phase insights provided guidance for the next steps: identifying opportunities to address challenges. Through workshops and discussions, the team identified three areas of focus:
- Evaluation Models: Developing methods to measure the impact and cost-effectiveness of services.
- Customer Experience: Redesigning service delivery to enhance accessibility and personalisation.
- Portfolio of Initiatives: Creating a range of ideas to support diverse employment needs.
These focal areas established a clear framework for progress, allowing for flexibility to adapt to Turku’s changing needs and laying the groundwork for practical, scalable initiatives.
Prototyping and building a portfolio: Prototyping helped the team test ideas and refine their understanding of which solutions could be effective. They focused on creating a portfolio of initiatives: a dynamic collection of options to be explored and adapted over time.
The portfolio prioritised 20 initiatives based on criteria such as:
- Addressing gaps for underserved groups.
- Strengthening partnerships between job seekers, companies, and the city.
- Enhancing skills development and accessibility.
This portfolio serves as a foundation for ongoing exploration and informed action, equipping the city with practical tools to adapt to evolving challenges and opportunities while maintaining momentum in improving employment services.
Building future capacity: The project recognised that solving employment service challenges is an ongoing journey. Instead of providing a definitive solution, the focus was on creating a framework to understand the challenges, explore possibilities, and build capacity for continuous improvement.
As one team member noted, “We now have tools to look at the problem differently.” Another added, “This process showed us how to take action even when we don’t have all the answers.”
For Turku, the project established a strong foundation for sustained progress, offering practical methods and tools to address employment challenges as they arise and evolve.
Innovation as a continuous process: Turku’s journey highlights the importance of exploration and adaptability in tackling complex challenges. By emphasising active processes and dynamic possibilities, the team laid the groundwork for ongoing improvement in employment services, setting a foundation for action in 2025 and beyond.