Business Finland: boosting innovation with intelligent data insights

Business Finland works to support Finnish companies to grow their businesses through innovation at home and abroad. This is a well-oiled machine and at its core is a CRM system built on Microsoft Dynamics 365. Greater data insights have helped it support thousands of Finnish companies through the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing their export sales by 20%, and allowing the Finnish government to fund topics and initiatives that align with its strategic goals. It is a platform that sets a global standard for business support mechanisms the world over.

“We succeed when Finnish companies succeed. That is the measure of our effectiveness as an organization.”

Hanna-Mari Parkkinen, Executive Director of the Experience, Marketing and Communications department at Business Finland is explaining the role her organization plays in supporting Finnish businesses to succeed.

“We are the government body responsible for encouraging business growth and innovation among Finnish businesses,” Parkkinen explains. “That is our primary task.”

It is a task that has become more complex over the past year and a half. “Typically, we work with about 3,000 companies a year,” Parkkinen explains. “But this year, that number has increased to about 17,000 because we are the main support body for Finnish businesses trying to navigate the pandemic.

“We offered nearly one billion Euros of funding in about 2-3 months during 2020,” she says.

The scale of the operation her department manages is extraordinary, as is the pressure that comes with such responsibility. But according to Parkkinen, her team embraces the challenge: “We embody the Finnish mentality; when we do something, we work together to make it happen, we persevere.”

That perseverance has helped Business Finland adapt to exceptional circumstances. But underpinning those efforts is a CRM system that holds everything together.

“It might not be the most exciting thing, but our CRM is the absolute heart of what we do,” she says. “It allows us to orchestrate the entire operation. And to make sure that Finnish businesses receive the most relevant opportunities to continue to grow their businesses.”

An organization with people and innovation at its roots

Headquartered in in Helsinki, Business Finland is a government organization with a rich cultural heritage. “We have really old roots,” says Parkkinen.

“It started with a sailing boat called The Swan of Finland in the early 19th century that would travel to big cities across the oceans, promoting Finland. Then, in the second half of the twentieth century the Finnish government realized that we didn't have oil, we didn't have gold, we didn't have jewels – but we had people; so that’s what we started to invest in.”

That investment in people translated into an emphasis placed on education and innovation. “What Business Finland does with these strong roots is innovation,” says Parkkinen. “We help Finnish companies to innovate with funding, ecosystems, and platforms. Then we support companies to export to different markets. We currently have over 40 offices in 34 countries.

“We are about 760 people in total, working to identify the opportunities in different markets, and what Finnish companies can do to tap into them.”

There is a huge amount of data involved in the operation. Data on Finnish companies; data on the markets they operate in; data on potential partners in the export countries; data on the people Finnish companies need to recruit in order to continue to grow, develop and disrupt.

“That’s where our CRM comes in,” she says. “It gives us that common view on our customers, which is essential for helping them to grow and accelerate the innovation journey and the export journey. Without that common view, we can't help.”

The CRM solution the organization has is Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Turning data into intelligence and added value

“When we first implemented Microsoft Dynamics 365, one of the main values for us was having the security levels we needed, which some other cloud services didn't offer,” says Maarit Klein, Senior Director of the Creative Hub at Business Finland.

“In our vaults we have the innovation plans of the biggest Finnish companies,” adds Parkkinen. “The value of that IP is astronomical, so robust security isn’t an option; it’s a must-have.”

But security wasn’t the only consideration when selecting the CRM for the organization. The connectedness of the data points across Business Finland’s remit and the insights that unlocks for the organization was the main draw.

“The system really brings into my mind the classical Microsoft digital feedback loop,” says Tommi Oksanen, CRM Consultant at Business Finland. “We are getting signals from all across the organization, from all the users, employees, customers and so on, and then putting the data together to get actionable intelligence.”

“It's used for collecting signals,” he adds. “It's used to create intelligence from those signals. And then to guide the organization and its people to create additional value for our customers and for the Finnish market.”

But it the insights that the system unlocks for Business Finland that really allow the organization to support Finnish businesses in a strategic way.

Honing in on the innovations that matter most

“Having the strong core at the heart of the organization is important,” says Klein. “But it’s also about the tools we now have to help guide the customers through the whole journey and get them where we want them to be.”

That journey includes the ability to personalize the information being sent to companies to a very specific degree, presenting them with opportunities that are highly relevant to their specific scenario and business context. “We can decide when to send certain information, how to present it, when to follow up and so on,” she adds. “We have complete control over that journey.”

More than just presenting relevant opportunities to businesses, the insights from the system also allow Business Finland to support organizations that align with strategic priorities such as sustainability or the circular economy.

“Take the current situation with the European-wide Recovery and Resilience Facility,” says Parkkinen. “The first question we have to ask is who should hear about the fund. For example, what are the companies that invest most in the circular economy that would really need our expert services, or would really need find a new ecosystem, or who would need new funding in order to accelerate the R&D on circular economy? That's a really typical question that we ask from our CRM system.

Beginning September 1, 2023, Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will merge into a single offering under Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Learn more about the evolution of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.