Veera Mustonen

Veera Mustonen first joined Spinverse in 2021 to lead the Smart Cities and Mobility team and is now leading the Digital Industries business unit. She helps companies, consortia and cities with their R&D&I needs, including, for example, building and scoping collaborative projects, finding partners, preparing public funding applications, and developing growth and innovation strategies.

Veera has 20+ years' experience from planning and managing different types of R&D&I activities, ranging from single-company projects to large-scale, multi-party innovation programs and ecosystems. She works with both growth-seeking SMEs and large corporations in the fields of e.g. smart mobility, built environments, digital twins and other data-driven innovative solutions. She is also an experienced facilitator of public-private-partnership activities. 

Veera worked in 2013-2018 at Forum Virium, an innovation company of the city of Helsinki, where she also served as a deputy CEO. She led a large-scale smart city development project, Smart Kalasatama, which became an award-winning Finnish Smart City Innovation District featured in global rankings and media. She created an innovation ecosystem where hundreds of companies and startups collaborated with academia and public organizations to advance smart city service innovations, using data and new technologies in the domains of energy, mobility, health and smart living. Veera was responsible for consortium creation, fundraising and managing dozens of smart city and mobility projects funded by Horizon Europe, EAKR, EIT and Business Finland.  

In 2018 Veera relocated to Australia where she worked as an Executive Director of LifeLab at Tonsley innovation district, to start a commercial living lab supporting companies to create new products and services to the growing market of ageing demographics. 

Earlier in her career, Veera Mustonen pursued 15 years in the ICT industry, developing innovative human-centered concepts and services for companies such as Nokia, Sanoma and Fujitsu. During 2001-2011, Veera worked in senior management positions in Nokia, leading future business planning of smartphones and user experience projects.  

Before joining Spinverse, Veera was leading a consulting unit at MDI Ltd, focusing on advising largest cities, SMEs and public-private ecosystems on their strategic development, innovation and smart solutions. 

Veera holds an M.Sc. of Cognitive Science from the University of Helsinki. Currently, she is also enrolled as a doctoral candidate in industrial management at Aalto University. Her dissertation examines the scaling up of smart city experiments in public-private open innovation platforms. 

In her spare time, Veera enjoys outdoor activities, reading and travelling, as well as urban and cottage life with her family and friends.