City as a Service

Through the development of the City as a Service concept, we create sustainable ways to produce and renew services together with residents, customers and partners, utilising innovations, information and digitalisation.

We believe in the City-as-a-Service – our holistic, collaborative, and fast approach to enabling innovation 

City-as-a-Service (CaaS) is our strategic co-design model for a future-proof and sustainable community. It places innovation at the very core of Espoo’s identity and administration. The culture it nurtures is a key source of competitive advantage. It explains why Espoo can adapt to tumultuous and uncertain times. It ensures the outreach to communities to understand locally- and globally-driven needs and ideas, the energy to bring together relevant stakeholders across diverse sectors of industry and society, and the means to facilitate development and place the city itself, its services, premises, and infrastructure of world-class innovation institutions at the service of a great idea – regardless of whether it comes from a CEO or a toddler.  

To implement this model into reality, we have set up a City-as-a-Service unit. Traditionally, in a city’s organizational structure, the innovation team is based in the ICT department and focuses mainly on technological and digital innovations. But in Espoo, we believe in order to succeed in a digital transformation, we need to succeed in the cultural transformation: in changing people’s mindsets and behaviour. This is why our City-as-a-Service unit is based in the Mayor’s office with a direct communication channel to the Mayor, and with a systemic and holistic view over the whole city organization and the ecosystem. This unique structure helps various city operations to meet rapidly changing customer demands.  

The City-as-a-Service unit is divided into two teams: Knowledge management and Co-creation & innovation. The CaaS unit encourages and pools together hundreds of innovative minds and specialists in their fields to solve challenges and work on related projects, both inside and outside the city organization. This is set to lead to "outside of the box" ideas that may have otherwise been overlooked by executives who cling to known organizational traditions. The CaaS organization and its related culture is a key source of competitive advantage — and explains why we can adapt quickly in tumultuous and uncertain times. 

Key roles are played by:

  • service orientation
  • flexibility
  • accessibility
  • networking.