Finland, unfortunately, lacks behind when it comes to trend of ecological and ethical consumption. You can see it for example from the selection of coffee that is served in various restaurants and cafeterias. In Finland it is not a common thing to be served as fair traid or organic coffee- the situation is totally different in for example Sweden or England. One thing that I am still confused about is that should I prefer organic over fair trade, or the other way around… 

This picture is from Sweden Mc Donland’s where they serve organic coffee.

Greetings from England, again. This time I visited Lego and had a wonderful possibility to interview their experience and innovation manager Cecilia Weckström. Lego truely is an exceptional case in using crowdsourcing or open source innovation. They use in their product development lego fans that construct all possible stuff with their software Lego Designer. Lego also uses help of their adult fans when designing new concepts and products.

What really astonished me positively in Lego facilities in Slough was that their officerooms were full of all possible lego stuff. Also the employees had a new task to do: to build dozens of packages of lego stuff. Actually, I think that is wrong that people get payed for doing such a nice job

Well, anyway, I managed to spot some weak signals in England. One of them is a gift package in a bookstore. You could buy there a, adopt-a-pony pack. By buying the package you will donate the money for taking care of one pony. You had also possibilities to plant a tree, save the wild life etc. Is this one of the first signs of growing trend of ethical consumption and intangible goods.

Is there an ethical mobile phone? some person was asking in a column in Helsingin Sanomat today. “No there is not”, answered Päivi Pöyhönen from Finnwatch , an organization that is interested in how ethically organizations operate. Ms. Pöyhenen axplained that there is no use to try to compare different mobile phone brands, because the components are usually coming from same factories.

The most worrying issue is that circumstances have not got better during last years in these factories.

The story outlines that mobile phones today are far from being ethical, but the things could go better in the following years. Because of activists in theis area companies have also started to have a closer look at ethical issues. The article spurs us to wait for the first fair traid mobile phone.

(article in Helsingin Sanomat, 19 March, 2008, page D2, kysy vain: Onko eettistä kännykkää?)