Estonia is stepping up its efforts to drive Europe’s green and digital transformation as part of the EU-funded FINEX project. This two-year Horizon Europe initiative brings together partners from six countries - Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Cyprus - with the shared goal of strengthening and connecting their cleantech innovation ecosystems.
The ambition behind FINEX is to help these regions evolve into a cleantech hub by making their innovation ecosystems more competitive, more open to collaboration and better connected internationally. The project also seeks to advocate for improved EU-level regulatory, fiscal and legal frameworks. Ultimately, FINEX supports innovators who are working on novel deep tech solutions and helps them access specialised testing environments and services so that they can move faster from research to real-world deployment, contributing to Europe’s transition towards a climate-neutral economy.
Estonia’s priorities and challenges
As part of its work, FINEX has carried out an extensive mapping of cleantech potential and barriers across all participating countries. Estonia stood out by submitting the highest number of challenges among all innovation ecosystems involved, highlighting both its strong innovation activity and the particular difficulties it faces.
While Estonia shares the same broad cleantech priorities as many European countries, including energy, mobility and the built environment, it also emphasised two additional areas that are especially relevant locally: waste management and cleantech for defence.
In energy, Estonia is aiming for 100% renewable electricity by 2030 and CO₂-free energy by 2040, while also focusing on energy efficiency. In the built environment, there is growing emphasis on the reuse of old buildings for circular construction, on improving energy efficiency and on better spatial design to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the construction sector. Waste management has emerged as a key area, with efforts to increase the value extracted from resources and to expand circular economy practices, such as the introduction of mandatory bio-waste collection. Mobility is another important field, with ambitions to achieve zero-emission public transport and domestic ferry shipping by 2040, as well as to explore smart solutions for water mobility. Estonia has also highlighted the need to strengthen resilience against climate-related disasters and to address the lack of integrated data that currently slows down smart governance and cleantech adoption.
Despite this strong innovation drive, FINEX has identified several barriers that currently hold back the testing and scaling of new solutions in Estonia. Regulatory hurdles can make testing complex, even with supportive frameworks in place. This makes it harder to pilot new technologies. For example, in Tartu, the UrbanDip project introduced real-time water quality monitoring using sensors, but its data could not be officially recognised because current EU directives only require bathing water to be tested four times per summer.
Estonia also faces challenges in using sustainable construction materials and putting circular economy practices into action. In addition, more focused financial support is needed for renewable energy projects, along with better coordination of existing funding programs. Finally, the absence of consistent, integrated data for decision-making is another barrier that limits the speed of cleantech deployment.
A strong network of experimentation spaces
At the same time, Estonia already has a rich network of experimentation spaces that can support innovators working with cleantech and deep tech technologies from early research to market-ready solutions. These facilities are open to a wide range of users, including startups, SMEs, large enterprises, researchers and public sector actors.
Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech), which is one of the FINEX partners, plays a central role in this ecosystem. Its Thomas Johann Seebeck Department of Electronics operates the ELIN Research Laboratories, which offer R&D facilities for hardware testing, 3D printing, control systems and robotics and are used by both researchers and companies for early-stage research, prototyping and system-level testing. TalTech also hosts the Near-Zero Energy Test House, which serves as a physical testbed for energy-efficiency technologies and renewable energy systems, and the MARTE Maritime Technology Competence Center in Kuressaare, which functions as a living lab for prototyping and validating new maritime technologies. The university’s Mektory Startup Incubator supports deep tech, cleantech and IT startups with mentorship, prototyping labs and access to networks, while its Laboratory of Structural Engineering allows load testing and material analysis of construction materials and designs. TalTech even has an autonomous vehicles testbed on its campus for testing self-driving technologies in real-world conditions.
Beyond TalTech, Estonia offers several other valuable testing environments. The national regulatory sandbox for self-driving vehicles enables companies and researchers to test autonomous vehicles on public roads under official oversight. Tehnopol Science Park provides access to real-life test environments, business development services and infrastructure, and hosts the GreenTech Cluster for cleantech, deep tech, spacetech and defence startups. In Tartu, the oPEN Living Lab provides renovated apartment buildings equipped with photovoltaic panels and smart home systems for testing positive energy neighbourhood concepts, while the Sparkup Tartu Science Park operates a Drone Living Lab for unmanned aviation technologies. The Tartu Living Lab for Circular Economy offers urban spaces for testing new solutions in waste management and resource efficiency.
In addition to physical spaces, financial support mechanisms are also part of the landscape: the Prototron programme awards grants of up to €35,000 to help early-stage startups build prototypes, and the FinEst Centre for Smart Cities runs the Smart City Challenge, which in 2025 will provide €1,68 mln for piloting two innovative urban solutions.
Complete information on experimentation spaces in Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Cyprus is available here.
Turning challenges into opportunities
The next seps for FINEX project is using all the gatheredknowledge to shape better support systems for innovators, while working closely with policymakers to reduce regulatory barriers, improve access to funding and build stronger links between research and industry. By clarifying its cleantech priorities, identifying obstacles and connecting its key experimentation spaces, Estonia is laying the groundwork to become a leader in sustainable innovation.
More information about the FINEX project and how to get involved is available at the FINEX Helpdesk.