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.
For over two years, Entrepreneur in Residence Asmo Halinen has worked closely with the team at Lassila Tikanoja (L&T), bringing his entrepreneurial skills to super boost their internal team. With Asmo’s help, L&T was able to formulate a clear product vision, effectuate, and double the number of users of their Ympäristönetti service. Ympäristönetti is Lassila & Tikanoja's digital service for waste management monitoring and development. The service allows businesses to review their waste accounting information and monitor waste management data and environmental impact at a highly detailed level.
One of the service providers greatly affected by the pandemic was Comforta, a subsidiary of the Lindström Group. Comforta specializes in textile management services for the hotel and healthcare industries. The company employs more than 500 people in Finland, Sweden, and Estonia. As it provides services that support and enable its customers, it could not do so as they were closed. Coventures partnered with Comforta to help with direction and to shape the future. In these unusual circumstances, we needed to rethink the entire business. Therefore, we started by defining what the purpose and the vision of the business is. We drew a common picture about what a company should do based on its strengths, recent group strategy, phenomena in the operative environment and what the current clients’ sentiment is.
Sweco is Europe's leading engineering and architecture consultancy. They have their hand in directly planning and designing the sustainable communities and cities of the future. Sweco's mission includes co-creating solutions to address urbanization, capturing digitalization's power, and making societies more sustainable. Coventures' Entrepreneurs in Residence, Sampo Lehtiniemi, and Riku Kokkonen, joined Sweco's development and management team. They aimed to recognize the real potential of Sweco's innovation and identify opportunities to expand their business.
Coventures' approach to market validation is radically different from what people are used to. In our model, one of our experienced entrepreneurs joins your team, bringing with them the knowledge and tools to validate your business idea. As we see it, our job is to help you make an informed decision about whether or not to proceed with your new venture. Read how we partnered up with our client Premix to validate their latest corporate-startup idea.
Changing the service portfolio can be an effective way to update your business and reach new customers. But how can we ensure we have assessed growth opportunities' potential through our client's eyes? The answer is hardly surprising; we need comprehensive background work and a plan to introduce the new service to our customers. Read on to hear how we helped our client Codento do the careful groundwork work and clarify their new service portfolio.
Often new products and services surface from well-identified customer needs, but after a while, the initial excitement wears off and is replaced by slower-paced progress. Sometimes we even end up questioning the viability of the original idea. These doubts often originate from a lack of clarity. Read on how we worked on these topics with the Lassila & Tikanoja Smartti Automaatio product.
Pulse247 is a Finnish software company focused on helping clients sell more online using the MyCashflow e-commerce platform. In 2021, Pulse247 had successfully grown into a company of 30 people and was transitioning from startup to a fully-fledged Product Company. Even though Pulse247 welcomed steady growth, the product development team had gotten way too big and rigid. But how to split the teams and maximize the effectiveness? These questions prompted us to work on this together and find solutions and the optimal way to structure product teams and support them with their product leadership.
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.