On leap day, there was reason to celebrate at Maria01's start-up campus, when KIRAHub, the built environment's very own digitization accelerator, turned five years old. KIRAHub is a public utility digitalization ecosystem in the real estate and construction industry, whose goal is to make Finland a pioneer in the sustainable digitalization of the built environment.
KIRAHub's story began already in 2016, when Prime Minister Sipilä's government decided to launch the KIRA-digi flagship project at the initiative of the real estate and construction industry. Teemu Lehtinen was chosen as the project's digital manager. When the KIRA-digi project ended in 2018, there was a strong consensus in the industry to get a continuation of the flagship project. 13 organizations in the KIRA sector took action from words and founded and seed-funded their own digitization accelerator organization, which was named KIRAHub.
The association was registered in July 2018, operations began in January 2019 and Teemu continued as CEO. At the same time, Vappu Id started as the first actual employee and Hub's home base, Urban3, was rightfully found at the Maria 01 startup campus. Special thanks to the Ministry of the Environment, which in the early stages of the operation financed several KIRAHub projects, thus giving momentum to the start of the operation.
RAKLI's Jyrki Laurikainen, who had already been the chairman of KIRA-Dig's strategic management group, started as the first chairman of the board. Under Jyrki's leadership, KIRAHub's values, vision, mission and strategic goals were defined. At the same time, the foundation for the annual own was created for the WDBE event (World of Digital Built Environment), where we wanted to get the world's best and most talented experts to talk about the latest research, trends, development and innovations in digitalization of the built environment. The event will be held for the seventh time on October 3-4.10.2024, XNUMX in Helsinki and Tallinn.
KIRAHub's basic operations are very strongly based on the ecosystem that has been born both physically in the Urban3 space located on Helsinki's Lapinlahdenkatu and on weekly events and information sessions. Around 30 built environment specialists and entrepreneurs work in the space every day. A huge number of different events will be held in the Urban3 space, as many as 2023 in 304.
KIRAHub has also had many projects and campaigns: one of the early efforts was the "Kynät pois" campaign, the purpose of which was to speed up electronic signatures. Another major social effort was the world's first artificial intelligence course in the built environment, which is open to all for free.
Although KIRAHub's operations have always been international, the official internationalization step was taken at the beginning of 2023, when seven European Hubs of the built environment founded the Urban Hub Europe community, which opens the doors to every KIRAHub member to the facilities and activities of other Hubs. KIRAHub has also been clearly noticed outside Finland's borders, as international visitors and delegations visit every month to get to know the activities and facilities. There has also been a desire to benchmark the activities of other countries in order to start their own similar activities. Would this be a new export product for Finland?
In 2023, the position of chairman of the board changed when I stepped into Jyrki's shoes. My responsibility was to renew KIRAHub's strategy, which wanted to keep the main focus on people, cooperation and breaking down silos. At the end of 2023, new strategic goals were presented
- together with our cooperation members, we promote selected development themes
- we connect the right factors together and
- we enable the introduction of new solutions and the flow of data.
As a concrete measure to promote the strategy, a cooperation membership model was also presented, which allows companies, communities, municipalities, cities or individual start-ups to join the KIRAHub community. The collaborative membership model has been a great success: to date, 49 organizations have joined the common ecosystem.
Although five years is a long time, it is also a short time to create something new. KIRAHub has clearly found and taken its place as a pioneer in the digitization of the built environment. However, KIRAHub's operations need new enthusiastic people, partners and members, so that we can further improve our effectiveness in the real estate and construction industry. The real estate and construction industry still needs a party that challenges us constructively and strives to bring the right parties together. This is why KIRAHub was founded and for this purpose it will continue to operate in the following years as well.
You can read more About KIRAHub, from cooperative membership ja From the WDBE2024 event.
You can also contact me about the topic.
Antti Aaltonen
Director, Construction Development
antti.aaltonen@rt.fi +358 40 514 3626Confederation of Finnish Construction Industries (CFCI)
Write a comment