When I stay at Taina’s house, my schedule follows her commute pattern. Picking up Rulle from tennis lessons in Munkkiniemi puts us near warehouse shopping, so we stock up the pantry.

On weekends, there’s an opportunity to prepare a leisurely dinner. This time, at Taina’s house in Soukka, we decided to cook Chinese food — an improvement over the choices available in local restaurants.

With weekday schedules full, visiting people sometimes rolls into family time. I suggested to Saku that we could talk while taking the kids to the park. One was on a training bike, and the other was in the carriage, when we had tea at the cafe by the seashore at Matinlahti near his house.

I’ve been around Helsinki often enough to know the sights. Rick was visiting Stadia from his university in Illinois, so we scheduled a leisurely afternoon together. We went to the computer superstore in Ruoholahti looking for a cable for his laptop, but didn’t find what he needed. On the way back, we walked by the west harbour where there are shipyards.

Social networks can be funny. When I was a conference in Berkeley, California, in spring, I happened to meet Johan who is from Helsinki. It turns out that he’s good friends with Karlos, whom I know from HUT, and I see regularly. We took the opportunity to schedule a dinner at Tapiontori together to discuss research interests.

One office where I’ve often met is at Nokia House in Espoo. I happened to bring my camera this time. Here’s the front entry, with a glass bridge over to the parking garage.

I’ve often found the front lobby to be warm. It could be because it’s a greenhouse effect, or it could just be that Finns like their buildings warm.

Minna usually takes advantage of my frequent visit, so that I get to have face-to-face conversations with some of her colleagues. This time, I met Minnamaria.

The coffee bar is by a display of Nokia devices — I think that they use the layouts to plan some of their showrooms.

As much as I tend to live on the Internet, my travels to distant places gives me the opportunity to be in the physical world.

Although I prefer the apartments at the Accome Parliament, the rest of the group stayed at the SAS Radisson Plaza just east of the Central Railway Station. The 20-minute walk to Stadia started by a new Ice Park directly on Railway Square.

On the other side of the Ice Park, we continued walking southbound on Mikonkatu, on the cold morning.

Further down Mikonkatu, looking back over the shoulder, the buildings look less modern.

On the way, we crossed by the Esplanadi, that runs down to the ferry docks and market.

As we crossed Mannerheimintie — the major street in Helsinki — we saw one of the famous electric trams.

Lonnrotinkatu runs past Stadia and towards the harbour where ships are built.

At Stadia, Taina had arranged for us to use the great hall on the top floor of the building. We were honoured with the grandness of the room, although our small group occupied only one small table.

We caught Gary up on the progress to date, and he described some of his research into innovation and leadership.

After a quick lunch out, we returned to the great hall to finalize the agenda for the Rendez workshop with sponsor on the next day. Since DLH was flying out early the next morning, he chose to relax, instead.

In these few days, we laid the foundations for the research agenda over the next year.

(by David): Minna had asked if I could talk with her friend, Taina, who had opted out of Nokia in favour of teaching at Stadia, which is the Helsinki Polytechnic. Taina finished her Ph.D. at HUT, probably a year or two ago. Minna told me that the Stadia building was actually the original home of HUT. It’s on the Bulevardi, beside the shipyards and waterfront in central Helsinki. The institution started as a Polytechnic, became a Technical University, and then grew out of those buildings for new labs to be built in Otaniemi, which must have been a forest west of the city back then. (They must have put those bridges in, because there are two choices to cross that expanse of water).

As it happens, one of the few times that our schedules lined up was during a class, so Minna and I went over to speak to the class. When I walked in the classroom, this seemed like an IBM meeting — every student had a laptop, and their screens were up. (There was a uniformity to the HP machines which makes me think there’s sponsorship going on). Taina introduced us, Minna talked about knowledge management, and I talked about my experiences with Instant Messaging, wikis and blogs.

When Minna introduced herself, she said that she was a mechanical engineer, but she actually gave quite a managerial talk. I remarked that my degrees are in business, but I was going to be giving the technical talk!

The director of IBM Almaden Services Research, Jim Spohrer, was here about 3 weeks ago, giving talks on how IBM thinks that universities should be reoriented to teach classes in “Services Science, Management and Engineering“. Minna actually was leading a research project at HUT before she went to the New Jersey, and had thought that her research was 20 years behind. In fact, it’s proven to be six years ahead, as her content is much the same as the IBM message now.

The Finns have a knack for industry and universities to be working together in a way that we find foreign in North America. Minna and Taina are cooking up plans to have a services course in early short order — by the spring — and are working a plot that I might get involved. There’s a possibility that we might get the Finnish managers to request that I be involved somehow related to my day job, rather than the vacation time I’m currently on. This would be welcomed….