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.
It’s rather unfortunate that most of the best actionable content for digital innovation is often written solely from the angle of startups, where you’re building upon a clean table. The reality, after all, is that >90% of the world’s current value is tied to legacy systems and organizations, as well as existing management practices— and with good reason: Old strategies and systems have been trialed and tested by time, and they’ve simply been proven to work.
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.
Product management always exists when building or growing a new product business. We need to decide on what to build, ergo you have product management. So it's not really a question of whether you have product management, but on what level your product management is, and whether it creates real value for our company.
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.
Emma Grönlund, a serial entrepreneur with over 10 years of experience in building new digital businesses globally join Coventures as n Entrepreneur in Residence. Emma is a generalist executive with the ability to set up processes for companies from scratch to get to important product launches.
When starting a new business, we often jump straight into choosing a digital service or a vendor and forget something vital. We forget to spend time figuring out what we really need and when that happens, the digital aspect of our business is left with untapped potential.
