The tacit knowledge of the forest industry - University of Jyväskylä receives it’s first Co-Innovation funding

In line with the vision of SEED - Solid Value of Digitalization in the Forest Industry -project, digitalization will enable Finland’s forest industry to significantly improve its productivity, develop its competitiveness and strengthen its position in the global market. The project brings together three research partners, eight partner companies and other joint actions.

Business Finland has given a research group led by Professor Pertti Saariluoma a funding of 132,000 euros as a part of the Co-Innovation funding received by the SEED project. The funding is the first Co-Innovation funding received by the University of Jyväskylä.

The SEED project’s four core domains of research are operational excellence, digital twins & productivity, future work & tacit knowledge and ecosystem orchestration in platform economy. The research lead by Saariluoma involves researching, developing, designing and processing tacit knowledge.

– Digitalization is changing work and processes. It is often narrowly conceived as a purely technological and technical process, even though the technical processes are essentially human, Saariluoma says.

The tacit knowledge in the forest industry must be adopted by a new generations of employees, but transferring this knowledge in the era of the great digital leaps is not self-evident. During the SEED project, the forest companies will open their doors to researchers and application developers, with the aim of bringing the resulting concepts to the users – and eventually the market.

– SEED is a multidisciplinary project. It is great that the consortium has been assembled with consideration of experts from different fields, Saariluoma concludes.

The two-year project has a total funding volume of over 7 million euros and is mainly funded by Business Finland.

Further information:

Professor Pertti Saariluoma, pertti.saariluoma@jyu.fi, +358 50 3732142

For more information about possibilities of Co-Innovation funding: Research and Innovations Services: ris@jyu.fi