Blog | Arcada

Nurses bridging north: Strengthening a diverse and sustainable workforce in the Nordic region

Internationally Educated Nurses (IENs) do not primarily struggle due to clinical incompetence. Rather, their integration into healthcare systems depends on factors such as language proficiency, credential recognition, workplace culture, and the extent to which employers provide meaningful structural support.

Category: Publication

Gamebadges, hidden competences, and why the friction matters

We presented Arcada's Gamebadges work at Supercell in April. Badges helped us spot hidden competences students were building but couldn't name. Proving individual work in team projects is hard, but that friction is the point. AI can help scale this without replacing real ownership or teacher judgment.

Category: Publication

The Reed Hackathon: From idea to product development

The Reed Hackathon at Arcada explored sustainable product design using common reed as a biocomposite. Through ideation, CAD, and 3D printing, a multifunctional product was developed, showing the value of early design decisions and hackathons for innovation.

Category: Publication

In the Age of AI: Who and what counts in open innovation

Some of the world's most important innovations no longer come from single companies working alone – they emerge from crowds. But who decides whose contributions count? And what happens when AI enters that equation? Two researchers explore the question from different angles.

Category: Publication

For the North: Unifying the Nordic paramedicine profession

The landscape of prehospital care is shifting. The days when Emergency Medical Services (EMS) were focused solely on providing critical first aid and rapid transport to hospitals are truly over.

Category: Publication

Healthcare Leadership – master’s thesis topics and themes 2025

The objective of this blog post is to review the themes and topics of the master’s theses completed during 2025 by students within the master’s degree programme Healthcare Leadership at Arcada. As part of the study plan, all master students of the programme are required to complete a 30 ECTS master’s thesis on EQF7 level, where they develop and broaden their knowledge base on healthcare leadership.

Category: Publication

Maritime heritage sites and sustainable approaches – insights from the CHARLO intensive programme in Åland Islands

In this blog post we describe how we approached the task of creating circular solutions and socially sustainable solutions for Sjökvarteret in Åland Islands.

Category: Publication

Weaving the WAVE: Navigating trade-offs in co-producing a Nordic marine bioeconomy

Planetary health is under threat, and the need to rethink our relationship with the ocean has never been more urgent. In this text we present WAVE, a new Nordplus project designed to transform marine "waste" into valuable skills and opportunities. In this blog post, we take an unusual step. Instead of reporting on completed work, we apply recent research on co-production to map out the tensions and design choices we face right at the start – using transparency as a tool for better management.

Category: Publication

Onboarding internationally educated nurses in the Nordic countries

This blog post reports the findings from a master thesis (Husted, 2024) that explored existing research on onboarding practices for internationally educated nurses in Nordic countries with the aims to identify best practices and recommend guidelines based on global standards and the theory of organisational socialisation.

Category: Publication