The multidisciplinary University of Turku offers companies possibilities in collaborative research, from projects on a single field to extensive multidisciplinary research collaborations involving various companies. Companies can get into contact with the University's extensive international collaborative network through projects.
The University of Turku is constantly conducting projects both large and small in collaboration with companies and businesses. Often, the projects are funded by third parties, such as Business Finland, the European Union, or the Academy of Finland.
Below, you can find examples of selected research projects and each faculty's company collaboration contact persons. You can ask them about starting up your own project.
University researchers can also carry out short-term consultations, commissioned research, and reports.
Ask us about collaborative projects and tailored research services!
Examples of collaborative research projects
Human-Centric Artificial Intelligence for Sustainable Future (HAIF) is a doctoral training project led by the University of Turku, involving 10 research groups from the Faculties of Technology, Law, Humanities, and Social Sciences. The HAIF project aims to provide doctoral training that promotes safe and secure, legally and ethically sustainable use of AI. An essential part of the HAIF project is the extensive network of partners, as the project involves international, multidisciplinary collaboration with both research organisations and companies.
The Virtual Sea Trial project will develop a unified and distributed virtual testing environment for ship systems. In the test environment, the shipbuilding ecosystem can test, validate, design, develop, and monitor things related to sea trials in cooperation and transparently. The virtual testing environment significantly reduces the cost risks associated with sea trials and the time needed to test ships at sea, which leads to direct emission reductions, enables the co-creation of innovations, and saves costs for the entire shipbuilding ecosystem.
The Dining Flow project addresses the Restaurant industry’s needs to understand and improve the diner's experiences in self-service restaurants and the industry responsibility to reduce food waste. The project also aims to develop data-driven decision support tools to enhance the decision-making process. The project is a part of KONE’s The Flow of Urban Life program within the Veturi initiative.
Turku School of Economics (TSE) at the University of Turku has launched a two-year research project aimed at developing green transportation concepts to support the green transition. In the GreenConnect project, potential emission reduction measures in door-to-door transports, including maritime transportation, are examined, carbon dioxide emission calculation models and accuracy are improved, and business potential for green competitive advantage is investigated.
>> News
The goal of the project financed by Business Finland is to speed up the development of emission-free marine technology, among other things.
>> News
Newlife is an ambitious KDT JU project aiming to secure the health of mothers and their babies by developing novel holistic monitoring solutions. Newlife project partners will together demonstrate different technologies to enable early and non-invasive detection of risk factors in pregnancies and for newborn babies.
The SusFlow project applies a multidisciplinary approach for shared solutions within a network of enterprises representing a multitude of competence areas with an LCA-driven focus. The project promotes sustainability assessments based on real data, a seamless flow of information, and a possibility to discover innovations to benefit the incorporation of sustainability as a practice within the shipyard ecosystem.
The DREAMS (Database for Radically Enhancing Additive Manufacturing and Standardization) project pushes the Finnish 3D printing to the international top level by year 2024. The project creates an open material database containing information collected from thousands of 3D printed metallic test pieces.
>> More information: Antti Salminen, Keijo Koskinen, Taina Eriksson
Loneliness and social isolation are a major concern leading to adverse effects on physical, mental and psychosocial health of people. Following the goals of the Smart Life Finland programme, PARAS project consortium proposes an ambitious solution for providing state-of-the-art playful health, learning and social content following the principles of platform economy. The goal is to create the leading platform of the playful digital content open globally to content providers, smart device manufacturers and service providers. During the Co-creation the objective is to reach committed and optimal companies for the consortium and offer them an innovation platform to stimulate their operations and markets. Multidisciplinary expertise is a key for success of sustainable and novel solutions, PARAS project team consists of experts from the fields of health, sports and technology from University of Turku and University of Jyväskylä.
>> More information: Anni Pakarinen
PRIVASA boosts data-driven research, development and innovation by making it easier to access and share health data without compromising individuals’ privacy. The core aim of the project is to add flexibility in the way that health data can be utilized in various stages of product development. This aim extends beyond technical solutions, as it also requires trust-building between owners, holders and users of the data. Transparency, legal aspects and ethics are the cross-cutting themes to be explored throughout the project.
SMARTER project focuses on digitizing harbor operations and its purpose is to provide easily reproducible solutions for passenger and freight terminals. Smart harbours are in central role in future transport chains. Harbour operations connect the maritime transport to other modes of transportation and enable efficient logistics chains. The project focuses on the whole logistics chain from truck traffic to the port area and from the loading dock to the fairway. About 90 percent of Finland’s international trade travels by sea. As large markets are far away, it is worth taking full advantage of digitalisation in transport.
BIIDEA (Blended Interactive Innovation Distance Ecosystem Architectures) inspects innovation processes in spaces of extended reality. The focus is on how innovations emerge and develop in virtual (VR), augmented (AR) and mixed realities (MR) and in their combinations in blended hybrid spaces of extended reality (XR) in which physical environment, people and mixed reality meet and blend into something novel and useful for the innovation processes.
The Sea for Value – Fairway DIMECC program is the first program initiative under the One Sea ecosystem. Digitalisation and increased levels of autonomy in transport are expected to take leaps forward in the coming years. This development can help in creating safer, more efficient, sustainable, and reliable service chains to meet the requirements for a better quality of life and global prosperity.
Sustainable Shipbuilding Concepts project focuses on creating sustainability based value in shipbuilding through designing more sustainable concepts for cruise ships and related systems in a way that the complete network can contribute into more sustainable business processes including material selection, design, manufacturing, social aspects and features. The goal is to generate new business processes that bring such sustainability benefits that can be quantified and which help actors to strengthen their foresight and adaptation abilities in the often-changing sustainability-framework.
This project is a collaborative consortium project led by research organizations, University of Turku and VTT, including multiple parallel projects from industry stakeholders throughout the value chain.
The purpose and mission of the AIGA program is to enable executing responsible AI in practice through laying out best-in-class governance mechanisms and auditing principles for algorithmic decision-making and building a commercialization roadmap for AI governance and auditing.
>> AIGA
Cancer IO is a new cancer immunotherapy focused top-level collaborative research and innovation project that starts as a part of the Business Finland’s Personalized Health Program. This University of Helsinki coordinated project integrates immuno-oncology (IO) activities at the Universities of Helsinki and Turku, University hospitals and one central hospital, 8 Finnish small or medium enterprises, several cancer patient organizations and the 9 largest IO-investing pharmaceutical companies. With a total funding of 10 million euros, Cancer IO will be one of the largest IO focused research and innovation programs in Europe.
The Digital Disruption of Industry (DDI) project studies the impacts of digitalization to the Finnish society through the lens of the industry. The consortium is part of the Disruptive Technologies and Changing Institutions research project, operating under The Strategic Research Council (SRC) at the Academy of Finland. The consortium, led by Aalto University Professor Martti Mäntylä, consists of ten research groups from Aalto University, Lappeenranta University of Technology, the University of Turku, VTT and ETLA.
The research group at the Faculty of Law at the University of Turku is led by Professor Tuomas Mylly.
Innotori is a development and co-operation project on local food chains, focusing on small and medium businesses. The goals include activating innovations within businesses and building a wider network of co-operation.
The Sustainability and Transparency in Shipbuilding Networks project focuses on collecting, combining and utilization of sustainability information of materials and manufacturing processes for creating sustainability-based value in shipbuilding.
SUSTIS is a research project coordinated by University of Turku (Department of Future Technologies). The research partners include three units in University of Turku (Future Technologies, Centre for Collaborative Research, Finland Futures Research Centre), VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, and the industry partners Meyer Turku Oy, SSAB Europe Oy, Naval Interior Team Oy, and Piikkiö Works Oy.
Faculty contact persons
Head of Faculty Development Anu Warinowski
Lecturer Timo Virtanen
Assistant Professor Mika Viljanen
Head of Faculty Development Eeva Rainio
Professor Pekka Räsänen
Director Timo Vasankari
Director Antti Saurama