Business Finland, the Finnish government organisation for innovation funding and trade, travel and investment promotion, started the development of mission-oriented operations already in 2020. As part of their journey in 2021 they procured expert services to support the development of Business Finland’s mission-oriented concept and the related impact evaluation framework. The aim of the concept is to increase the effectiveness of the operations of Business Finland, support the solution of broad societal challenges and accelerate the building of cooperation to promote innovation and business in line with Business Finland Strategy 2025.
The work was divided into two subprojects: subproject 1 – Concept development; and subproject 2 – Development of the monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) framework. EFIS Centre joined 4FRONT, a consulting company in Finland, to deliver subproject 2. Its aim was to enable missions and programmes to develop their impacts, goal-setting and the related monitoring suitable for continuous evaluation. It was done fully interlinked with the concept of Business Finland missions and process creation to ensure fully integrated solutions supporting leadership, management and development of missions. The result of this work was one general impact logic framework and indicator set for missions and one general set for programmes. The work benefited from an international benchmarking conducted by EFIS Centre analysing the experience in mission creation and MEL development in Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands.