🇫🇮 Nokia is developing applications for the industrial metaverse with Business Finland’s leading company funding

Business Finland has granted funding to Nokia’s new LEAD leading company project, which aims to promote the usability, safety, and energy efficiency of the future internet and metaverse. With this leading company project, Nokia is committed to significantly increasing its own and its partners’ research, development, and innovation (RDI) investments in Finland.

The industrial metaverse is an emerging market that offers great business opportunities for Finnish companies. Metaverse refers to a solution that seamlessly connects the physical and digital worlds. The metaverse makes it possible to collaborate, simulate, and remotely operate in real time, for example.

“With solutions that enable the industrial metaverse, we can design, manage, and optimize industrial operations in real time. For example, digital twins can significantly improve productivity and safety in the industry, particularly in product and process design. However, realizing these benefits requires substantial research and development efforts, which we will carry out together with a broad group of ecosystem partners,” says Jarkko Pellikka, Director, Nokia Veturi Programs

Leading company projects play an important role in accelerating companies’ research and development activities

Business Finland will fund the leading company project with EUR 20 million, and its partners may be funded with a total of EUR 50 million.

“The aim of the government’s increasing R&D efforts is to leverage private capital into R&D. This can be achieved well through our leading company funding, which we direct to a wide ecosystem through leading companies. An appropriate autumnal metaphor would be that we are using leading company funding to create a mycelium in Finland that will produce a harvest for a long time. We look forward to seeing what kind of an impetus the new leading company projects by Nokia and the entire telecommunications sector will give,” says Lassi Noponen, Director General of Business Finland.

With its LEAD proposal, Nokia participated in the 2023 leading company competition, the other winners being Kempower, Patria, Valio, and Wärtsilä. The RDI increase commitments of the winners of the 2023 leading company competition amount to nearly EUR 500 million when adding up the annual RDI increases of the leading companies compared to the starting level.

Since their introduction in 2020, the leading company competitions have produced a total of EUR 2 billion of RDI increase commitments from leading companies and networks of 720 partner projects to support the achievement of ambitious future missions.

This is what the LEAD leading company project is all about

Nokia Veturi program significantly enhances energy efficiency and the security of data communication in modern and future wireless networks, both of which are critical for the industrial metaverse – a concept expected to revolutionize the way industries operate. The industrial metaverse requires real-time interaction, high data throughput, low latency, and seamless connectivity, all areas where advanced 5G technology provides substantial benefits. Along with Extended Reality (XR) technologies, these are essential components of the industrial metaverse due to their ability to create immersive, interactive experiences that optimize various industrial processes and operations.

As the use of related services and applications increases, the volume of data traffic and the frequency of cyber-attacks are expected to multiply in the coming years. Without radically updated networks, platforms, and applications, the industrial metaverse cannot exist. Finland’s specialized expertise positions us well to become a significant global player in this space. Through the Nokia leading company program, Nokia has the opportunity to establish a globally leading center of excellence for the industrial metaverse in Finland, covering all key areas of the XR value chain – from future network technologies to business software applications and the versatile use of artificial intelligence that supports them.

More new leading company projects will be announced next year

The 2024 leading company competition is currently under way, and the winners will be announced in early 2025.

The competition proposals have been required to address significant future challenges and have a significant impact on the government program’s 4% RDI and 75% employment targets.

Explore the funding for leading companies and their partners, as well as the ongoing leading company projects

Further information

Business Finland

Kimmo Kanto
Senior Director
firstname.lastname (at) businessfinland.fi
+358 50 5577 852

Kari Komulainen
Senior Director
firstname.lastname (at) businessfinland.fi
+358 50 5577 842

Nokia

Maria Vaismaa
Global Head of Public Relations
firstname.lastname (at) nokia.com
+358 40 752 9198

Originally published on 30 October by Business Finland.

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