The cornerstone of unity

INTRODUCTION 
At the beginning of the 1990s, people started talking about social innovations 
– innovations that cannot be 
patented 
– as the foundation of the Finnish welfare state. This foundation has also been a prerequisite for all 
Finnish technological innovations.
This book is a collection of 100 social, political, and everyday innovations from Finland. The writers are a 
brilliant group of innovators, innovation adapters, and decision makers. They are of different ages, have different 
ideologies, and come from different parts of society, but they all represent the joy and seriousness connected 
with these innovations. These innovations range from small to important, from extensive political structures to 
everyday fun. 
The book’s first Finnish edition in 2006 – when Finland had the presidency of the Council of the European 
Union for the second time 
– didn’t attract much attention in Finland. These things are taken for granted here, like 
clean water. In Finland you can drink water from any tap and in fact from all of the 
country’s more than 160,000 
lakes without getting sick. But when the drinking water and waste water pipes of the town called Nokia were 
accidentally connected and thousands of people got ill, Finns realised the value of what they had taken for 
granted. 
This book 
– and the Finnish innovations – have however generated a lot of interest throughout the world, and 
it has so far been translated into 27 languages (Albanian, Arabic, Bengali, Belarusian, English, Spanish, Farsi, 
French, German, Hindi, Hungarian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Mandarin Chinese, 
Mongolian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Tamil, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Urdu), and there are plans to 
translate it into 10 more languages. 
People are interested in how a poor war-torn c
ountry was able to achieve one of the world’s highest degrees 
of social equality and become one of the most flourishing IT societies, with its good and bad sides. This book 
presents many of the components of this success story, with topics ranging from the single-chamber parliament 
to the dish-
drying cabinet, from child daycare to public carpet washing piers, from communal work (“working 

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bees”) to tripartism, from ice swimming to coalition governments, and from Linux to Santa Claus. They could be 
condensed into the six secrets of free education, municipal self-government, gender equality, civil society, 
consensual decision making, and social security for all 
– and the trust and social peace that these create.
My wife, Vappu, and I have used the book to talk about Finnish society in dozens of countries, and we have 
seen the immense interest that the book arouses. Finnish embassies have distributed it to members of 
parliament and government in many countries. It is used as a textbook at the National Institute of Administration 
in South Korea, where it was immediately given to 700 industrial, commercial, and political executives and 
leaders. In Kazakhstan, the book was distributed to the country’s 2,000 libraries, in Mongolia, to schools. 
I hope that similar books will be written in other countries too, for the peoples of the world have much to give 
to each other, and many have considerably more of these innovations!
I want to thank all the contributors; my former parliamentary assistants, Katri Söder and Olga Boustani (née 
Borovkova); and the producers of the first edition, Pilvi Riikka Taipale and Joonas Luotonen.
I really enjoyed making this book!
Ilkka Taipale (editor) M.D., Ph.D.