Q: First and foremost, can you please share with us a brief overview of your company? When was Howspace established, and what are your goals? Who are the brains behind the company?
We have strong roots in consulting, training, and facilitation. We have been practitioners in these businesses for over 20 years and originally developed the technology for our own purposes.
Today we are focusing on helping others with the same challenges of impacting individuals and organizations. We have been working closely with researchers in this field. Howspace is a spin-off (2008) of Humap, which was founded in 1999.
Our current CEO Mr. Ilkka Makitalo is one of the founders of Humap, and he is also the Howspace product owner. Besides his work as a consultant, trainer, coach, and facilitator, he created the concepts for more than 20 different tools before Howspace was launched in 2018.

CEO & Co-Founder at Humap
Product Owner at Howspace
Q: What industries do you serve, and who are your current customers?
Howspace is a horizontal platform that does not have any industry-specific features. There are plenty of use cases and application areas.
The five main application areas are:
- Organizational development
- Learning
- Workshops and events
- Networks and communities and
- Digitalization of professional services
We are strong in many segments. We start with consulting companies, training service providers, facilitators, and public development organizations in new markets.
Q: What exactly is a digital facilitation tool, and how does it work? What makes it essential for modern enterprises?
Howspace makes it easy to create any facilitated process. It does this through simple structures and a strong emphasis on dialogue. Most of the market solutions are too complicated, noisy, and unstructured. Howspace makes it easy with no coding and a drag-and-drop UI to create a workspace for your process. It supports synchronous and asynchronous collaboration with the 16 widgets used to build the process for your learning journey, workshop, event, transformation process, etc.
There are plenty of tools for facilitators to support the high participation rate and use built-in behavior-based notification systems. Build-in real-time AI features are making participatory methods available for a new scale of engagement. What this all creates is much faster processes, better engagement, better decisions, and better relationships.
Q: What are some of the most pressing issues with the recent cultural shift towards remote work today? And how is Howspace addressing these?
The most important question is how to create a culture where days are not spent in meetings, and it is impossible to get things done, just as it is now. The right balance of synchronous and asynchronous work needs new operation methods and the best tools for that purpose.
Howspace has a unique combination of synchronous and asynchronous coordination within one platform. Howspace makes it possible to lead and facilitate multi-faced processes in a way that instant messaging, separate virtual meeting tools, and document management systems don’t cover.
Q: According to Cisco’s annual data privacy study, 60% of respondents said they were moderately or very concerned about the privacy protections associated with the tools they were using to support these remote interactions. What safeguards has Howspace put in place to ensure that users enjoy a secure experience?
We take security and privacy issues seriously. We follow European GDPR legislation strictly. We organize regular third-party testing. We save our data in different locations. Our services are hosted in AWS, and it has high standards in privacy and security. We have plenty of optional settings that our customers can utilize and offer integrations such as SSO.
Q: As the Industry’s #1 choice for digital facilitation tools, what practices and measures should enterprises consider to prevent and reduce the risk of “video conferencing fatigue,” and how can we control information overload and other stress triggers?
We have been worried about this current situation. Employees have their calendars full of back-to-back-to-back meetings, and people are spending too much time ineffectively.
Howspace delivers the possibility to coordinate also asynchronous work as part of the collaboration. One essential part of successful collaboration is to make participation easy for others by good facilitation. One aspect of good facilitation is to be aware of cooperation’s granularity: the moments for participation can and quite often must be tiny to make them fit busy days.

Q: Tell us more about Howspace. What are its key features and capabilities? How does it compare to other digital facilitation platforms available in the market?
An admin user can easily create a workspace based on their needs and way of working. The end-user experience is essential: there is no training needed for the tool. It feels natural, familiar, and intuitive.
The difference? Structure, simplicity, continuity, and all supported by real-time AI.
Other tools in the market are digitalizing the old facilitation structures with all the limits they have. If an admin has a whiteboard/canvas, they can manage a small group of participants, and they still have to spend a lot of time to collect the data and make sense of what is happening.
With Howspace, an admin can transform standard methods and take them to a new level. Admins can combine synchronous and asynchronous work and have even tens of thousands of participants and make sense of all users’ input in real-time.
Structure helps to engage: it is an experience for the participants that feels like a planned journey, with a scheduled and visualized design that creates participation.
Simplicity makes participation rates high: Howspace is one click away, on any device, feels familiar, and there is no need for training.
Continuity creates impact: it´s not just part of the “show;” you begin before the work (to orientate, connect, and understand), use it during (real-time documentation by the participants with AI analyses), and continue both between and after to join the thinking and turn action into reality.
Q: Can you provide us with sample use cases for Howspace?
Howspace can be used for any collaborative human process where dialogue matters and where someone is leading or facilitating the process: learning programs, organization change processes, workshops, events, networks, communities, projects. You name it.
Q: Looking into the future, what are some market trends or technologies you see on the rise in the digital facilitation space, and how is Howspace meeting these?
Howspace has a vast collection of elements needed for long term facilitation. All built-in, and besides that, we allow embedding of third-party tools within our Embed widget. We can offer one-click access to everything meaningful for a process. It is impossible to create continuity and commitment with tools that are one-trick ponies, and if a facilitator tries to combine several solutions, it makes an unstructured and chaotic participant experience.
Q: Do you do partnerships?
Yes, absolutely. We are looking for partners who are facilitating change, transformation and learning initiatives or events and workshops for large companies.
About Howspace
Howspace is a Digital Facilitation tool that helps you inspire co-creation and boost engagement, powered by AI.
Howspace is designed explicitly for facilitator-led workshops and events. Howspace works in asynchronous, virtual, AND live settings. You can build an interactive journey for organizational development, transformation, and change initiatives with an intuitive drag and drop editor.
Howspace helps you involve your participants and deliver a more substantial impact through active dialogue before, during, and after sessions. You can analyze extensive discussions with AI in seconds. You can cluster themes or create a summary with a click of a button.
We have built-in video meetings, so you don’t need to use a combination of Teams, Zoom, and other tools. Your participants can access their workspace like magic, with a single click of a button – no login details needed.
Start a free trial or book a demo with us.
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