COFIRD

What it is

COFIRD, Co-creation for Finnish Indian R&D, is a research and development consortium working across Finland and India. It is funded by Business Finland and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland. The partners are KONE, Konecranes, Demola Global, 3D Talo Finland and Citynomadi, and the work applies digital twins, generative AI and virtual reality to the elevator, escalator and crane sectors in India.

COFIRD project page at Tampere University

What I do

I coordinate parts of the consortium. In practice that means working with partners in two countries on coordination and on data gathering, which is a different job from running a study in one place with one set of expectations about how quickly people reply and what counts as a decision.

The interview data is the part I own. I coded and analysed it, and I am writing the resulting paper with colleagues. It sits in the publication list as in preparation.

I also built the collaborative map. It is a shared output built on the Citynomadi map API, so that what partners gather in different places lands somewhere everyone can see it.

Why it matters to me

Coordination is usually treated as overhead: the work you do so the real work can happen. Running data gathering across two countries makes it obvious that it is not. The shape of the coordination decides what data you end up with, and a shared artefact that everyone can actually see does more for a distributed team than another status meeting.