Turku as a Women's Health Epicenter and Blue Economy Powerhouse: Inside Minna Arve's Business Turku Plan
When Minna Arve walks into meetings now, she's no longer Turku's mayor. Her new role is quieter but as important: CEO of Business Turku, the region's business development company.
The brief is simple to say and hard to execute: make the Turku region grow, make it sustainable, and make it matter internationally.
She draws a firm line between Business Turku and the usual alphabet soup of chambers and associations: "I think there is a quite straightforward distinction: we are city owned and we are working for the whole region, so all the municipalities of this region are also financing our work."
The job isn’t lobbying; it’s improving "the business area and the conditions for making business in this region," helping existing companies grow and attracting new ones in.
The operating system is the classic Nordic "triple helix," but with teeth. "We are offering practical services in their growth path... and then this working collaboration with universities, universities of applied sciences, public services as well as companies, entrepreneurs," she explains, "so this kind of triple helix model that we are talking about here is the platform how we ensure that companies also get their support from those networks."
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Those networks are not just diagrams. She mentions a hydrogen network with "more than 70 companies... representing the different parts of the value chain." Similar setups exist around women’s health, maritime, diagnostics and creative industries.
Business Turku’s value isn’t chequebooks; EU rules and national frameworks limit direct funding and tax tricks. Its value is orchestration, access and information: who to talk to, where to land, which funding instruments to chase, and which university lab might actually care about your technology.
Within that frame, Minna Arve is choosing to "strengthen your strengths" instead of chasing shiny new sectors. "Maybe to put it very simply," she says, the strategy is about "making those things that we are doing the best possible way and then having some international and also national kind of excellencies there."
Betting Big on Women’s Health
The first of those excellencies is women’s health. In May, the region launched Women’s Health Hub Finland "as a network with the researchers, with businesses and the public sector to develop women’s health in terms of research, where we see that there is a huge gap of research."
The numbers she cites are stark: "It’s really a 1 trillion dollar business globally and there is a huge, huge gap in research funding for women’s health. If you take all the funding for research in different health problems, excluding cancers, one percent, only one percentage is going to women's health issues."
Asked directly whether Turku can become the main city for developing technological solutions in women’s health, she doesn’t hedge. "Yes," she answers. Pressed again—"that’s the goal, right?"—she repeats: "Yes."
And she wants proof, not branding.
"I'm a really result oriented person so I want to see that things are really evolving. I want them to be measured. I want to see the number of the new businesses coming within women's health for a couple of years. I want to see the numbers that are bringing more employers for the women’s health area. I want to see the numbers of exports growing and so on."
Minna Arve in an interview with Entreprenerd
At this point, it is worth noting that on Wednesday December 10th the Finnish parliament approved €70,000 in funding to launch the operations of the national Women’s Health Hub Finland.
The state’s contribution supports the Turku region’s ambition to build Europe’s leading research and innovation hub for women’s health, bringing together companies, research organizations, and healthcare providers.
Rewiring Maritime into a Blue Economy Powerhouse
The second big pillar is the blue economy wrapped around Turku’s maritime base. "Basically the whole maritime industry of Finland is based here in the south western coast of Finland," she notes, with Meyer Turku as "one of the locomotive companies in there." Around that shipbuilding core you find pharmaceutical and diagnostic industries and a spreading layer of green transition and digitalization work.
Over the next four years, Business Turku wants to stitch that into a coherent blue economy and blue transition story: autonomous vessels, cleaner logistics, dual-use technologies at the intersection of maritime, security and sustainability.
Add in hydrogen, AI, quantum and neuromorphic computing, plus a focused push on visual narrative, film and virtual worlds around the Logomo area, and the map starts to look less like "another mid-sized European city" and more like a dense testbed of overlapping deep-tech and impact verticals.
The Boldness Gap and the Growth Mandate
But for Arve, the real bottleneck isn’t tech. It’s boldness.
"I think the last thing, the bolder, is something that the whole Finland is a little bit lacking at the moment," she says, "the boldness or being courageous enough to take a little bit risks also for the future."
Minna Arve on what Finnish businesses (and society) are missing
And she doesn’t exempt her home turf: "That’s something I think will challenge us also here in the Turku region, that how we will really get entrepreneurs, businesses so strongly, take risks in order to grow, find their growth paths, find their internationalization paths.
I see a huge amount of amazing companies having a lot of skills and their products might be really interesting, but somehow they still settle up and being quite nicely here in the Turku region and not maybe having that growth path in their minds."
That’s why, when she lists her "first intake" goals for 2026, the first is blunt: "the growth is something that Finland is really lacking at the moment, it’s been lacking actually for 18 years, so our main task is to get growth coming in at least in business region Turku." The second is that this growth must be sustainable. The third, implied all along, is that women’s health and the blue economy aren’t just buzzwords—they need to show up in those growth numbers as exports, jobs and new companies.
Legacy Without a Name on It
Why take this job after eight years as mayor? For Arve, it’s less a career detour than a continuation. As mayor, she says, they were "very much working hard to make Turku as a city as well as the whole region to grow in terms of population, in terms of economy, values, employment," and she believes "we did quite good work." Now, she adds, she has "the possibility to continue that and having this focus on business life especially."
At the end, the conversation turns to legacy. If they sit down again after this four-year cycle, how does she want to be remembered as CEO of Business Turku?
"I want to be remembered in that way actually, I don’t want to be remembered," she says. "I want our companies to be remembered for that, that they developed and crossed paths in this region that was remarkable compared to any other areas in Finland."
Minna Arve's goal by the time she finishes her role as CEO of Business Turku
It’s a neat line, but it also sets a clear bar. If, four years from now, people talk less about the ex-mayor and more about a cluster of women’s health innovators, blue economy players and unexpectedly ambitious Turku-born scaleups, then Business Turku will have done exactly what she’s trying to engineer: a city whose story is told by its companies.
