Finland to host two NATO Innovation Range events in October

Finland will host two NATO Innovation Range (NIR) testing events in Oulu and Riihimäki in late October, the Ministry of Defence has announced.

— We are building a lasting and repeatable model for cooperation that gives both national defence and the whole alliance faster access to new and promising technology, said Minister of Defence Antti Häkkänen.

The NIR Capability Demonstrator in Oulu on 28–29 October will present Finland’s testing, evaluation, validation and verification (TEVV) capabilities to Finnish stakeholders and NATO and allied experts. Areas include counter-drone systems, AI-based command and control, jamming-resistant 5G/6G communications and unmanned systems integration.

Riihimäki hosts Technical Observer Days FUSE data Experimentation on 26–27 October. It is linked to two events in Latvia: NATO’s Digital Backbone Experimentation, DiBaX26, and the counter-drone experiment LCI-X Crucible 4-26, which runs 19–30 October.

According to the ministry, they focus on unmanned systems and AI for surveillance and decision-making. Allied Command Transformation will use the link between the Riihimäki and Latvian sites.

Both events are part of Finland’s implementation of NIR Future Connectivity, a structure created from a joint Finnish-Swedish initiative. It examines how next-generation communications work with autonomous systems.