Nordic Business Forum 2020 in Helsinki rescheduled to 2021

Nordic Business Forum announces new dates for its physical conference due to the COVID-19 crisis and concern for the well-being of its stakeholders.

This difficult and exceptional situation caused by the outbreak of coronavirus has created a lot of uncertainty in the world. Like any event organizers, we at Nordic Business Forum need to make some difficult decisions to ensure we can continue to serve and create value to our customers in 2020 and beyond.

According to the updated instructions set by the Finnish authorities on 17 June, our Nordic Business Forum 2020 event in Helsinki on 23-24 September could only be organized with certain restrictions. These restrictions make it impossible for our guests to participate and network in an indoor event like ours with over 7,500 people. In addition, the travel restrictions for our speakers and customers seem unlikely to be lifted before September. We’ve also looked at a report by the Finnish government-appointed scientific panel published early June which suggests that until there’s a vaccine for the virus, large indoor events should not be held due to the bigger risk for the spread of the virus. The health and wellbeing of our customers, partners, speakers, and employees is a top priority in the conference operations. Therefore, unfortunately, we have come to the conclusion to reschedule our flagship event to September 2021. All tickets to Nordic Business Forum 2020 in Helsinki are automatically valid for the 2021 Helsinki event organized on 29-30 September 2021.

“Even though the COVID-19 situation in Finland is currently fairly well under control, the threats of the pandemic are still there. Globally, many countries are struggling, and we have no certainty of what the situation will look like in September. Our main event in Helsinki is a large international indoor event, which is why we have decided to reschedule the event to 2021”, says Aslak de Silva, CEO of Nordic Business Forum.

Due to travel restrictions and not being able to organize events this year, we have also canceled the 2020 Speaker Contest. We will share details about the 2021 edition of the contest in the beginning of next year.

We want to thank our customers for their understanding, patience, and excitement for the event. Our entire team is sad that it had to come down to this and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you. We will contact each customer to explain in more detail what this means for you. We would also like to thank our partners for their commitment and flexibility. Together we aim to support leaders who want to rethink their business and strengthen their leadership.

Inspiration continues through online events and monthly webinars

Even though we can’t get together in person this year, we will continue inspiring leaders online. Throughout the past few months, we’ve organized numerous webinars and one larger online event that gathered more than 2,500 people from around the world. We will continue our work online in the future as well. Our popular webinar series is continuing with monthly webinars featuring world-class speakers. We are also doing our second online event together with Oslo Business Forum on 24 September.

In 2021, Nordic Business Forum will be organized on 29-30 September in Helsinki also focusing on the theme of Rethinking Business. To date, we have already confirmed Yuval Noah Harari, Lloyd Blankfein, Björn Wahlroos, Francesca Gino, and Zoë Chance to speak at the 2021 event. We will be announcing more speakers once they are confirmed. For more information on the 2021 event, visit the event website.

“We are naturally heartbroken about the fact that we had to reschedule our main event. But we are sure we can continue our mission – building leaders who change the world – in the future too not only through our events but also with our digital services,” says de Silva.