In our blog we share things we've learned about leading, advising and building ventures. Occasionally we'll tell you about our people, how we do things and what we believe in.
How to create an ambitious growth strategy for a corporate-backed startup working in an exciting, fast-growing electric vehicle charging market? Plugsurfing is an e-mobility service provider and charging service for electric vehicles, connecting its customers to Europe's largest, most up-to-date electric vehicle (EV) charging stations with digital payment services. At the beginning of 2021, Plugsurfing had a recently assembled, highly committed, and excited leadership team that had set ambitious growth goals for the business. Our entrepreneurial skills-set convinced the leadership team, and they invited us to facilitate the strategy process. In the facilitator's role, we could bring in new methods and ideas on how Plugsurfing's leadership team could build a strategy that would be easy to implement and owned by the whole company.
One of the biggest challenges for corporations when building internal startups is finding and attracting senior entrepreneurial talent. The need may also be temporary if we find out that there is not a strong enough business case to be made. Tommi Huovinen is one of our Entrepreneurs in Residence, and his job is to work as an intrapreneur at L&T and to create measurable growth.
Validation is an essential part of a new product or service launch: It can be pretty easy to get ahead of ourselves and start planning things without the necessary knowledge. Skipping the carefully done groundwork can be a recipe for disaster. Our client UpCloud is planning to launch a set of new products/services. To get a third-party view and to understand if the investment would have a chance to become a success, UpCloud asked Coventures to help conduct a pre-study. During the project, we conducted a competitive analysis and a series of interviews with UpCloud staff, their customers, and industry experts.
The Finnish Donald Duck is a highly valuable product for Sanoma, and the weekly comic book has become one of the best-selling Finnish magazines, reaching almost 700 000 people every week. Despite the enormous popularity of the print magazine, the digital service did not grow as desired. The digital service had already been around since 2012 but was still not getting much traction. Sanoma even discussed if the service should be discontinued altogether. Coventures jumped in to help Sanoma make an informed decision about Donald Duck's digital future.
ANDRITZ is a globally operating technology market leader that provides plants, systems, equipment, and services for the hydropower, pulp and paper, metalworking and steel, and solid/liquid separation industries. As part of the ANDRITZ innovation program, a cyber security joint venture company OTORIO was founded. We started a project to productize OTORIO's offering and to create sales materials that ANDRITZ's sales team could utilize in their work.
Customer discovery is imperative when we want to build a product or a service that truly meets our potential customer's needs. Our friends at Kapacity.io asked us to help them with their customer discovery process. They wanted to form a clear picture of their potential customer segments and understand which segments are the most promising ones for their business. Also, they wanted to create a compelling sales narrative and materials targeted to the segments found.
Kiilto Ventures wanted to understand what focus areas they should concentrate on when looking for co-operation or investment opportunities in the future. Kiilto already had a hunch of what the focus areas should be but wanted an outside opinion to be sure they chose the right ones and have solid reasoning behind their choices.
How could we fight the world's most challenging problems such as cancer, diabetes, food shortage, and climate change? Would it be possible by eliminating human errors in laboratory processes by using the level of reproducibility used in the aviation industry?
