Business finland renews its learning programs and internationalization work with Howspace

Known as a global growth accelerator, Business Finland has begun to renew its eLearning work and online facilitation with learning experience platform Howspace. Business Finland searched for an online training system, for its own use, specialised in online training and eLearning. The main goal was to support developing collaboration, sharing knowhow and experience, as well as overall management of the programs. It came down to the selection of the digital facilitation tool, Howspace.

 “The references strongly impacted our choice. The experiences of the other users of the platform opened up for us how well Howspace really works in training and online facilitation. The Howspace users, who have experience with several equivalent systems, strongly praised the intuitiveness, user-friendliness, increased work efficiency, and service support,” describes the digital development manager of Business Finland, Kaisa Kosonen.   

Business Finland exports Finnish ideas out into the world. It funds and helps companies to grow faster and develop their innovations into international success stories. Now that Howspace has been harnessed for the operation development, online training, and eLearning use, it supports the organisation with these goals. Especially in Visit Finland, which Kosonen represents, there is a strong need for renewal of operations through the use of digital facilitation.

“We already have a full bustle going on. There was an acute need for sharing knowhow and developing collaboration,” tells Kosonen. “Howspace enables us to work with more agility and more openly with our regional collaboration partners.”

Kosonen names the concrete benefits Business Finland has gained from Howspace in detail:

1. Decrease in the amount of emails sent.
2. Working with the operators in the field eases when everyone is working in the same online environment. Commenting on materials and strategic plans is made transparent for everyone.
3. Agility and sense of community are increased.
4. The possibility to learn and do work independent of time and place.
5. A whole new dimension is formed in the training department. “Before we only had an online PDF document.”

Howspace offers a big leap towards a sense of community

The head of transformation of Business Finland, Minna Matinaho has tried using the tool to support a big event in the organization. Howspace brought 600 people together and convinced the users.  

“The threshold for using the tool is incredibly low since initializing its use is so easy. The participants experienced the digital work as really interesting and inspiring. As a group we got to genuinely build a shared organization culture,” says Matinaho.

“The system enabled people to participate already beforehand and lots of things were happening online already before the event itself. The tool offered a big leap towards a sense of community. It was easier to come to the event when we had already done some warm-up work together.”

From the perspective of the change, Matinaho sees Howspace as a channel to build commitment and bring the things that are important for people close to day-to-day life.

“With the help of Howspace we can bring the things important for the employees close to them at the suitable moment. The conventional intras aren’t suitable for this purpose because they contain so much data that the user doesn’t form an understanding of, “what’s in it for me?”."

According to the duo, Business Finland sees big potential in using Howspace.

“Initialising the use of the tool has been internally exhilarating. No one needs to be convinced about the benefits Howspace brings or the importance of the new mode of operation. We have been clearly waiting for this kind of tool, because it really makes our work easier.”