Expert Takes: Jani Vallirinne

In October 2023, you published The Finland Metaverse Initiative: Virtual Potential into Real-World Impact, a road map to position Finland as a global leader in the metaverse industry. How have things been progressing since?

We held our kick-off event in Helsinki on 19 April 2023, and we have now created five Metaverse In Action programmes focused around the twin verticals of technology enablers and business networks. Each of the programmes holds weekly meetings attended by a dedicated programme leader, along with companies and stakeholders. They have advanced several project proposals to start making the metaverse a concrete reality, and we are getting companies, consortia, and research organisations to work on them, based on a common idea of the metaverse.

I have also been active internationally, promoting collaboration with different countries to bring a global dimension to the initiative. We want to get countries like the US, UK, Brazil, Germany, and China around the table to ensure the technologies are as open as possible. It is vital that no part of the metaverse should have vendor lock-in, otherwise people may not want to invest. But we must also be mindful that companies need motivation and will want to profit from their intellectual property.

So we need a holistic vision for the metaverse, in which different components are the intellectual property of individual companies. But those components need to be interchangeable to allow for competition. Then the best solution for a practical problem wins—and gets rewarded for its work.

Your vision of the metaverse is founded on the values of well-being, freedom, openness, and trust. How did it come about?

The original idea for the strategy came from Business Finland, the official government agency that promotes trade and investment. The original intention was to focus on foreign investment and exporting technology. But I soon realised we couldn’t base our entire strategy on that, because it would be too narrow. So we started to broaden out from the bottom line and think about our defining values.

We had five working groups, each exploring different aspects of the metaverse. They were all tasked with identifying Finnish values as well. Some participants came from abroad, which enriched the process with different perspectives. Their final lists were condensed and combined to produce what we have today. There are a lot of similarities with the EU’s strategy on virtual worlds, but with a Finnish twist. You can see it in the focus on Sisu, a Finnish concept that denotes a form of inner strength and perseverance.

Values are important. We need to think about how we ensure that the metaverse benefits everyone. That’s where real value comes from—making a change for the better. We need to use the capabilities and potential we have for the benefit of all. Then the commercial benefits will come naturally.

This interview is from our first opus, released in June 2024. You can read the full opus here on our website.