South Karelia’s RIS3 supports the systemic transformation towards a low carbon economy through “Increasing material efficiency and clean energy adoption for sustainable development”.
The core regional competences relies on the strategic alignment with LUT University, which is the top energy research university in Finland. South Karelia’s RIS3 builds upon competences from different areas, among other, energy water management, environmental science and sustainable business. A key idea is to develop solutions that can make the difference at the global level, after pilot phases in the region. Local municipalities and companies are committed to cooperate with universities to achieve this goal. In practise this is done through offering public investments as experimental environments for innovative ideas whenever it is possible.
The region aims at developing local solutions that are globally scalable. This is done in cooperation across industry, public sector and research and education organisations. South Karelia has a strong natural resource intensive industry that is a key partner for developing and testing industrial scale solutions.
There are ongoing works on RIS3 for the next programming period 2021-2027. The strategy is already well aligned with ecological and economic sustainability goals but more attention needs to be put on the social and community aspects.