Insights

Great opportunities for sustainable growth can appear from multiple directions. Sometimes, they occur as a result of unforeseen circumstances, such as global events which trigger a re-wiring of business, government, and society’s mode of operation. Sometimes these transformational shifts are recognized by large corporates who have a clear understanding of how fast the snow is melting at the edges of their organization, recognizing that they have to simultaneously dramatically change to a new business model, at the same time as delivering on existing business commitments. Join a series of conversations around these topics, arranged by HCL Technologies and moderated by our Patrick Halford!  

Spinverse want to acknowledge some of our hardworking colleagues with promotions. In this round, we are celebrating Erika, Germain, Sonja, Virpi and Pentti. 

Veera Mustonen recently joined Spinverse as a Senior Manager. She leads an experienced and international Smart Cities and Mobility team with a wide variety of technology, industry and city management capabilities. Veera and her team support Spinverse customers in building and running complex mobility and city ecosystems and international consortia across organisations of all types. We had a chat with Veera about the future insights of this sector, which has been close to her heart for almost a decade.

This spring and summer,we were seeking for several new experts to join our ranks, and we are now gradually onboarding our newly hired colleagues. They will help our customers grow through public funding in health tech, defence and security, smart city & mobility, manufacturing industries, and ICT & electronics. Warm welcome to Renuka, Cloé, Veera, Robert, Simo-Pekka, Sameer and Diederick.

We know the warmest time of the year is not far away when our summer trainees join Spinverse to support our experts over the summer holiday season. This year, we are proud to introduce Maria Heinonen, Heidi Melkko and Joonas Paukkunen as our summer trainees. They were selected in our virtual recruitment event from more than 150 candidates.

Spinverse business continues to grow and renew to meet the customer needs and to offer top expertise on public funding, and existing or emerging technologies. As our experts accumulate more experience with Spinverse, we try to offer opportunities to take on new responsibilities. At the same time, we warmly welcome new experts to join our ranks. This spring, we have had several recruitment processes in our business units and are now proud to introduce our latest promotion and first new colleagues.

The main focus of more than 60 Spinverse experts is to innovate, ideate and challenge. This is why the company’s working environment called for inspirational spaces for innovation. Spinverse recently moved to Keilaniemi, Espoo, to larger premises and aimed to create an environment where employees can work in a variety of ways, meet colleagues and also celebrate success.

Spinverse founder and Chairman of the board Pekka Koponen shared his thoughts about Finland's recovery and resilience plan. What opportunities does the recovery package offer especially for Finnish industries, and how can board members promote the growth opportunities of their companies from this perspective? Read here Pekka's expert advice to companies and their executives.

When funding calls open and the consortium gears kick into action, there is a lot of excitement mixed with uncertainty and risk. Consortiums do not come fully formed, and risk is not just isolated to new technologies or organisational challenges. It is a combination of both and also includes other factors, such as regulation, ability of organisations to collaborate, global phenomenon, ships getting stuck in major trade arteries and so on.  Spinverse's Patrick Halford, VP, Digital Industries discusses on how to manage consortium risk and how Spinverse can help. 

In an interview with Finnish newspaper Kauppalehti, Pekka and Laura Koponen talk about the present and future of Spinverse. All large companies in Finland know the consulting company founded by Pekka Koponen, even though Spinverse may not ring a bell to the general public. The company is a very well-known collaboration partner to various large and also small and mid-sized companies, as it has helped them gain over 500 M€ in EU-funded money for R&D&I. 

Last year was one of the busiest and most successful years to date for Spinverse. We welcomed many new colleagues, new customers and worked on exciting new projects. We are proud of our skilled colleagues who have worked so hard to help our customers and are delighted to share the latest news about promotions. What is more, warm welcome to our new colleagues in the Spinverse family.

Spinverse is one of the nine partners in the STARDUST project, launched in 2017, to create a miniaturised neurosurgical implant leading to a proof-of-concept for a new treatment approach for Parkinson’s disease. The four-year project has now progressed to its final year, coming a few steps closer to introduce novel ways to treat a wide variety of diseases.

Heli Teerenhovi joined Spinverse as Senior Manager less than two months ago and has already familiarised herself with some of Spinverse’s health technology projects and the opportunities brought by EU funding to innovative technologies. We discussed with Heli about the future of health technologies and how the new solutions will help provide patients and their care personnel with a more personalised and effective care.

LuxTurrim5G is developing and demonstrating a fast 5G network based on smart light poles with integrated antennas, base stations, sensors, cameras and other devices. This ecosystem project led by Nokia and facilitated by Spinverse opens new digital services and business opportunities for a real smart city. One of the companies providing solutions for the ecosystem is Orbis from Vantaa, Finland. They manufacture radio frequency and optical fibre assemblies and take care of the assembly and device integration for the smart light poles. Orbis has experienced tangible benefits in the commercialisation process of their technical solutions after having joined the consortium a year ago.

Spinverse team recently got together to shortly meet up with most of the colleagues face-to-face (keeping a safe distance). We wanted to raise a toast to this year’s successes and most of all, to our Consultant Vilja Vara, who reached a milestone of 10 years with Spinverse this autumn.

The European Association of Innovation Consultants (EAIC) was launched on 5 November 2020. What originally started as an informal working group in September 2019, was formalised by the members as an association that now gathers more than 40 members active across Europe. The aim is to foster the discussion on common interests with a possibility of future collaboration and actions. Founder of Spinverse, Pekka Koponen, was one of the founding members of the earlier working group and we are glad to see him elected as President of EIAC.

We are glad to introduce our newest experts to the growing family of Spinverse. Our new colleagues complement our already strong expert teams with their expertise on forestry, bioeconomy, advanced energy sources, forestry, EU policies, and health tech – all very hot sectors in today’s industry landscape. Meet Jyrki, Anna, Sonja, Heli, and Jayden.

In today’s rapidly changing world, very few organizations or people can make it alone. At best, orchestrated ecosystems built around companies can be strong drivers for growth and competitiveness but building and leading them can be tricky. A group of Spinverse ecosystem leaders recently rolled up their sleeves with Ulla Koivukoski for an interesting book project. The newly published Ecosystem Handbook offers fresh insights for engaging different people and organizations, to work better together to solve complex problems and grand challenges. The book gives practical help both for ecosystem leaders and all people working in them.

When our customers succeed, we succeed. So do our employees. The new promotions in the Sustainable Industries business unit are a result of relentless work in supporting our customers’ projects, big and small. Warm congratulations to our colleagues! This month, we also welcomed a new colleague in the Spinverse team!

In July, Spinverse Consultant Sonja Lätti defended her doctoral dissertation on the evolution of innovation and strategy processes at Aalto University School of Business, becoming the 14th holder of doctorate degree in our company. She presented her case study on the development of the people flow solutions at KONE between 2004-2015. The findings show how the efforts on both top and middle management levels are interconnected when driving change in a large organisation. We asked Sonja a few questions about her research and how she managed to combine work and scientific study.