Press release, 6 October 2008 

Speeding up innovation in the Real-Time Economy Community

The Real-Time Economy Community is launched today.
The main idea in the community is to innovate and develop new real-time technologies and services. The community is open for everyone to join.

The Real-Time Economy (RTE) Community promotes initiatives related to innovation and to the creation of new networks that enable the diffusion of real-time technologies (such as RFID and electronic invoicing). In addition to turning the business process more real-time, these innovations and technologies also pave the way towards a society where learning, decision making and services are all in real-time.

- In order to make the change happen, we need forerunners on all levels from grassroot level to CEOs, states the RTE project coordinator, Tuija Lompolojärvi. The community networks globally all the experts, service providers and their clients, researchers, media, and other people interested in real-time technologies.

The main objective of the community is to encourage the members in the community to share their experiences related to new technologies and, moreover, to innovate new ones by posting ideas on digitalization and thus challenging others to give comments.

- Another important objective of the RTE community is to distribute knowledge and research results related to real-time technologies and digitalization. At the same time, it promotes research initiatives on new technologies through the Real-Time Economy Competence Center which has been created at the department of Business Technology at the Helsinki School of Economics, adds Esko Penttinen, the coordinator of the competence center.

Towards more sustainable development

The Real-Time Economy Community persuades consumers and businesses to decrease their ecological footprints by promoting the digitalization of various business processes. Furthermore, the community encourages its members to critically evaluate their daily routines in terms of energy consumption.

- Take for example the current invoicing practices. Sending and receiving invoices in paper format consumes excessive amounts of time, energy, and paper, even though electronic invoice technologies are already available. It has been estimated that electronic invoicing would save 14 million trees annually, lowering considerably the CO2 emissions at the same time (100 g CO2 per invoice), reminds Penttinen.

The RTE community has been developed and created using open source code and the community utilizes many new innovative features of the web 2.0. Currently, the community receives about 1,000 visits per month, but this number is expected to increase considerably after the official launch of the community on October 6, 2008.

Further information:
http://realtimeeconomy.net
http://www.hse.fi/rte

RTE project coordinator M.Sc. (Pol.Sc.) Tuija Lompolojärvi, ext.tuija.lompolojarvi@tietoenator.com, tel. +358 44 051 8689
RTE competence center coordinator Ph.D. (Econ.) Esko Penttinen, esko.penttinen@hse.fi, tel. +358 40 575 4520
Professor Virpi Tuunainen, virpi.tuunainen@hse.fi, tel. +358 50 589 7541
Director Bo Harald, bo.harald@tietoenator.com, tel. +358 50 641 01

The Real-Time Economy Community has been developed as part of the TEKES funded Real-Time Economy program which is a collaboration between Helsinki School of Economics, TietoEnator, Federation of Finnish Enterprises, leading Finnish banks, Confederation of Finnish Industries, TIEKE Finnish Information Society Development Center, Dimes ry, and Dicole Ltd.