Iso Omena Service Centre – meeting place where communal innovations spring to life

How to offer good-quality public services in a city that is made out of five big city centres and numerous local ones spread out on a large geographical area? Iso Omena Service Centre, in one of the big city centres of Matinkylä-Olari, is Espoo’s intelligent but simple innovation to solve the problem.

Iso Omena Service Centre offer better public services to the community by bringing together everyday services and people. The city provides services that citizens need at a place that is not only a bustling connection point of busy transport routs but also a place where people actually want to spend their time – the Iso Omena shopping centre.

Services of your life in one place

People can use ten different public services at the service centre. A library, youth services, a maternity and child health clinic, a health centre, mental health and substance abuse services, KELA Social Insurance Institution, a Service Point, HUS laboratory, and Kohtaamo, a meeting place for art and culture, are all located in the same place.

“We believe that intelligent services are born in the community – from co-operation between the service providers and people. This way we can develop better services for the citizens of Espoo,” says Veera Vihula, Project Manager at Iso Omena Service Centre.

And here we uncover the key to what makes Iso Omena Service Centre intelligent and unique: the centre offers a meeting place for people and the services themselves. Doing so the centre goes beyond being just a location where you can carry out your necessary chores, instead the centre opens you a door to communal innovation.

Innovation platform for the whole community

When there is interaction between people, the opportunities to create something new sprout. Iso Omena Service Centre is an innovation platform that encourages citizens to take an active role in making Espoo a better city to live in.

Whether you are an individual, company or any type of an associations, you can use various working spaces as well as co-create new ideas, services and products with other citizens. The service centre personnel are also there for you and eager to take part.

This is the Espoo-way of doing things. In the Espoo Innovation Garden ecosystem, people, companies and public services and organisations innovate and improve the quality of life of the city together.

“Iso Omena Service Centre, as a member of Espoo Innovation Garden ecosystem, is a place where the whole city’s innovation potential comes to life,” Vihula says

What will Espoo’s intelligent community look like in 2028?

With a young, growing and highly educated population, a thriving startup scene where a startup is born every day, and with the new West Metro Growth Corridor, Espoo has only just started to pick the fruits of the its innovation potential.

“I believe that the shared sense of community will only grow stronger in the coming years. We will have even better avenues for co-operation where different actors come together. This way we’ll find new, even more sustainable solutions to future challenges – solutions that will create more wellbeing and make Espoo an even better city to live in,” Vihula concludes.

Read more about Iso Omena Service Centre.

Ison Omena Service Centre's open innovation platform has been developed as part of the EU-funded 6Aika strategy. More information: www.6Aika.fi.

Image: Antti Kaipainen