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.
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.
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.
