Despite being positioned highly in global innovation statistics – ranking 7th in the Global Innovation Index (WIPO, 2024) – Finland faces a continued low level of innovations that turn to international commercial success (European Commission, 2024). Also, the growth and renewal of Finnish firms remain modest (OECD, 2025).
A pre-study conducted among Finnish leaders revealed a striking weakness behind the scenes: Finnish firms excel at technical invention, but they lack the market-centric capabilities needed to read emerging customer needs, articulate bold market visions, and orchestrate organisation-wide commitment to commercial impact. These capabilities are dynamic, configurational skills that enable firms to sense, respond to, and shape market dynamics from the onset of the innovation cycle.
The project “Enhancing Firm Competitiveness and Growth with Market-Centric Capabilities” is led by Johanna Gummerus, Christian Grönroos Professor at CERS – Centre for Relationship Marketing and Service Management, Hanken School of Economics. Other team members include Post Doc researcher Fares G. Khalil, as well as Professor of Practice Oskar Korkman and Professor Kaj Storbacka. A PhD researcher will also join the project.
The project team will deepen the understanding of market-centric capabilities’ development and relation to growth. Johanna Gummerus describes the expected outcomes:
As a part of the project, we will deliver diagnostic tools and benchmarks that enable firms to gauge and scale these capabilities, with implications for systemic innovation management. We wish to measure their prevalence across Finnish, Swedish and Danish firms across sectors, and discern correlations between market-centric capabilities and business growth.
In the project, the team will leverage existing connections within the Nordic research community to build a cross-institutional Nordic network around market-centric capabilities, accelerating firm growth and learning across the region.
Johanna Gummerus received a €120,000 research group grant in the 2025 funding round. The two-year grant was awarded in the Business Renewal focus area under the thematic special project “Innovations, Commercialization, and Growth.”
#Innovation, #Commercialisation, #Growth, #Market-Centric Capabilities