Kuntamarkkinat 2026: what municipality teams said after testing our tools

Kuntamarkkinat is Finland's national municipality fair. We spent two days at our booth talking with municipality representatives about one question: how does growth support actually reach the small businesses in their area? Our Marianne candies and Frank the Croc stickers ran out by Thursday afternoon, and many visitors who stopped for a sticker stayed to talk about their region's entrepreneurs.

On Thursday morning Maria Horelli-Rosenlew, Riikka Kuusisto-Kajander and Jasmin Blomstedt ran a 50-minute Growth Secrets workshop for people working in municipal vitality and economic development. Participants tried the Customer Segmentation tool on their own business ideas and looked at how a municipality could use the same method to identify and prioritise the businesses that bring the most vitality to the area.

From the feedback (translated from Finnish)

• "A useful tool."
• "A fast way to prioritise and focus on what matters."
• "Good to think it through yourself and make decisions in a structured way."

What we took home

When the people who run local business support try a tool on their own ideas first, they can explain it to entrepreneurs with real conviction. A municipality can send the entrepreneurs it chooses to our program, including targeted groups such as solo entrepreneurs, women entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs with an immigrant background, and we run the whole program without adding work for municipal staff.