Lasse Leponiemi
Executive Director & Co-founder, HundrED
Describe your role at your company. What’s the most important issue or topic you are working on at the moment?
I’m one of the founders and work as an executive director at HundrED. We are a Finnish education innovation organisation that discovers, researches and shares inspiring innovations in K12 education.
HundrED was born from the notion that in a world becoming increasingly connected and globalised, education can still be very local and isolated in its practices. Our goal is to support improvement in education and inspire a movement, opening up valuable innovations to spread across the world.
We go beyond just identifying problems by highlighting existing solutions already improving education worldwide. We focus on celebrating, inspiring, and empowering all stakeholders to create positive change in education, striving for inclusivity and openness. At the moment we are working with our partners to create supportive processes for education innovation implementation at scale.
Finnish Flow theme in Davos 2022 is Future of Cities. How are you and your company working towards a better future in our cities? What major issues are you hoping to solve?
Education is having a crucial role in equipping future generations with skills and competencies needed to address many wicked problems seen around us. For example, environment and sustainability education, democracy education, and cultural understanding can be built through pedagogically sound practices supporting local curriculums.
What’s the biggest change you’d like to see in the world?
The goal of education is to help every child flourish in life no matter what happens. I hope that through education we can increase equity and excellence in our societies. It sounds like a cliche, but education is the biggest equalizer in the world. Through education, we can provide meaningful possibilities not only to individuals but also sustainable ways of living to whole societies.
Tell us about your commitment to making this change happen: as a leader, what steps do you intend to take to make this change happen? What are you committed to?
I have been passionate about youth future orientation for more than a decade. I started as a student activist in the early 2000s. My approach was not to be on the barricades but to build collaboration and create possibilities for decision making for young people through national student organisations.
The younger generations are bright, extremely open to finding new creative solutions, and passionate about the future of the world. With everything we do at HundrED, we bring students and young people to work alongside industry leaders and experts to make their voices heard.
We as an organisation are committed to improving education systems through education innovations. Personally, I don’t believe in big reforms. Rather the change can be facilitated through multiple smaller iterations and experiments. The impactful and scalable innovations we are identifying as HundrED are well-positioned to support education providers and systems to get the improvements they want to have.
Davos: How is going to Davos in January going to help you in reaching your goals/commitment? What are your expectations for Davos? Who are you looking forward to meeting there?
The World Education Forum published a wonderful report called Education 4.0. in 2021. This report highlights many future skills and labor demands that education systems should be able to implement.
However, the high-level policy examples and requests are not enough. We also need to have very practical and concrete examples of how we can adapt and modify our education systems for the better. As HundrED we have researched over 5000 educational innovations. With the support of our large network of partners ranging from the World Bank to the LEGO Foundation, from local education divisions to hundreds of HundrED community members, we are ready to support education system improvements in their contexts.
Why did you choose this painting/piece of art? (at Ateneum) What does it represent to you?
The statue reminds me of two things. First of all, its name is “Kaiku” which means ‘Echo’ in English. It was a breakthrough piece of art for the Finnish sculptor Vallgren in 1887. In the current world, it often feels that everyone is trying to get their voice heard. As a result, you need to listen very carefully to hear the meaningful things within the mix of voices.