New Ventures boldly goes where no one has gone before

New Ventures is the company's research and development unit, with its focus on generating and developing potential new business operations and innovations.
Development Director Jukka Saariluoma points out that Hansaprint has previously invested vigorously in research and development work. This area is, nevertheless, seen as being so important that they wanted to set up a separate unit for this purpose.
"The new unit does not mean that development and innovation work in other units will stop - on the contrary," Saariluoma emphasises.

"With New Ventures the idea is that we can have more room to manoeuvre, and to look at things even more freely and more courageously than in other units. When you do research work alongside your own work or with the customer in a project, the boundaries are always necessarily more restrictive."

According to Saariluoma, a problem is a cause for joy - at least from the development viewpoint.
"Customers' problems are a fertile starting point for innovation work. We can, for example, analyse whether some upcoming technology offers a route for finding a solution to the problem.
The new unit provides excellent conditions for long-term work. In research and development work the timeline is sometimes a fairly long one.
"People often think that innovations come about by accident. But, when we work systematically over an extended period, the probability of our coming across quite new things increases significantly compared with waiting for the innovations to just walk through the door."

So what kinds of potential new business operations and innovations might New Ventures come across? Saariluoma says that, fortunately, not everything is known in advance. Currently under way are projects connecting, for example, printable electronics, the use of various code technologies with printed products, and the development of printed materials.
"In the long term, printable electronics will be an exceptionally interesting area, there are lots of potential applications, one far-fetched idea being, say, a magazine that can be read in the dark. More probable in the short term are solutions based on the various code technologies, with the first applications already visible in Hansaprint's printing work. For example, additional information can be found about a particular product by using a camera mobile phone or some other reading device to read a code printed on it. It is certain that a variety of solutions that increase the activeness of the various printed products will be in great demand in the future."
Saariluoma says New Ventures is involved in numerous ongoing Tekes (Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation) and EU projects, which are being carried out in collaboration between various top experts in their fields. Continual collaboration with the main equipment and material suppliers ensures that Hansaprint has the very latest technology information. There are lots of other partners in collaboration, with those active at the moment including Future Printing Center, Turku Science Park and VTT (Technical Research Centre of Finland).