EUROPEAN VOICES BY MARJA MAKAROW
How smart!
A
t the age of 17, after for more of this, Finland’s universities have eight years of piano leslaunched the Helsinki Challenge, a compesons and miserable thetition for science-based innovative ideas. ory lessons, I concluded Over 120 teams signed up for this year’s that I had no musical round. Twenty finalists will be coached talent whatsoever. The to further develop their projects, which realisation hit me after meeting a friend tackle challenges such as the digitalisation who improvised jazz without ever having of education, urban loneliness, the health attended a single piano lesson. My parof soil ecosystems, and sustainable transents believed I had inherited the music port. The competition is part of F inland’s gene: after all, my family had produced a centenary jubilee programme and it will long line of musicians, opera singers, and culminate in November in an award cereven a pop star. emony where the Last March, winning team in the café of the receives 375,000 CROSS-DISCIPLINARY, CROSS- euros to implement Helsinki Music Centre, I watched BORDER COLLABORATION IS their idea. Jukka Louhivuori A new record of WHAT DRIVES INNOVATION. demonstrate the 2.5 million patents SmartHand prowere filed worldject – an invention wide in 2015. The that transforms your hand into a musical driver of this surge in innovation is crossinstrument. He pulled on a leather disciplinary, cross-border collaboration. glove equipped with 12 textileRather than relying on local expertise, integrated sensors attached to smart scientists, innovators, and compathe fingertips. He a ctivated nies find via the Internet the best collabohis iPad, chose “saxophone,” rators across the world, defying instituand started tapping the sentional and geographical borders. sors. A beautiful saxophone However, a university research backtune emerged. ground or company setting is not always SmartHand is a “wearrequired to breed brilliant ideas. Take able” instrument that can Perttu Pölönen who was still in high be used anywhere, even in school when he invented Musiclock, a confined spaces such as an tool that makes learning music theory and aircraft. It is a teaching tool scales easy. The young Finn won the 2013 that makes studying music European Union Contest for Young Scienappealingly simple: even tists in 2013 and Musiclock was one of the small children quickly learn most popular apps downloaded in 2015 in how to use and love it. With the App Store. special software developed Had innovations such as SmartHand for the glove, you can play any and Musiclock been around during my instrument in any band or o rchestra youth, my experience with the piano might by erasing a particular track in an have been a happier one. l existing recording. Louhivuori is a professor of Professor MARJA MAKAROW is director of music education at the University of Biocenter Finland and a board member of the Jyväskylä in Central Finland. He is European Institute of Innovation and Technolamong the smart researchers who are ogy. She is former chief executive of the transforming their clever ideas into European Science Foundation and vice rector of new products and services. Hungry the University of Helsinki.
66 BLUE WINGS MAY–JUNE 2017