I am always amazed about the coolhunting qualities of the Finns. I am currently teaching our annual virtual COIN/Coolhunting seminar at Helsinki University of Technology and as happened to me the previous three times, the cool trends being set here just blow me away. It starts with well-known things like the Finns’ ubiquitous use of mobile technologies. Nokia communicators are everywhere. They are used as browsers in the restaurant, to call up Google and resolve the burning question of which is the oldest church in Finland. To find the restaurant in the first place, the communicator of course also includes a navigation system which easily guides us there through the narrow streets of Helsinki. And when we take a taxi back to the hotel, we pay the taxi driver using our cell phones. Quite different from the US where most taxi drivers in New York still want to be paid in cash!

Finns are also eager users of blogging and social networking. They were among the early adopters of LinkedIn, and they are currently actively embracing Facebook extensions and plug-ins. They even coined a new term for people who buy tech gadgets to obtain the right to belong to their own self-chosen digital tribe. “Yhteisöllisyys” comes from the term yhteisö which means “community” or “society” in Finnish. But as was explained to me, Yhteisöllisyys is more than just the Finnish word for community. It stands for a self-selected group of people who get part of their meaning of life from belonging to a loose association or virtual community sharing the same passion for a high-tech gadget. I am not sure if I understood the meaning completely, but from observing my son playing “world of warcraft” it seems to me that he is definitively part of that Yhteisöllisyys. It is not enough do be part of a virtual community, what counts is to be a passionate member of the virtual community. Surprisingly often, what Finns are passionate about becomes a trend very soon thereafter in the rest of Europe or in the US.