2020 Year in Summary And What's Ahead for 2021

Being no surprise to anyone, the year 2020 has been globally unique duet to COVID 19, where the effects on the market have been significant in many ways. Regardless of the big impacts on the markets, we were able to react actively to this change, by monitoring signals in the market, reacting to them agilely, and conducting experiments, where some of the key observations were.

Strong growth and acceleration of digital. Since the initial shock, COVID-19 biggest and most comprehensive impact on our own operations has been the significant increase in the use of digital services and practices, and the perception of the benefits and new opportunities that come with their use.

Market has woken up widely to notice the vulnerability of local startup ecosystems to current functions. In particular, the local ecosystem efficiency, based on the physical networking of people, often through various events, trainings, the metabolis, etc. Which practically ended completely when meetings could no longer be arranged. - Towards need to recognize things in a way where similar outcomes must not only be possible but also made possible digitally. Other benefits of digitalisation, and in particular new opportunities for cooperation internationally, have also been noted.

Significance of data. - There has been a sharp increase in understanding the benefits of available data and in understanding, illustrating, and reading data in general. The wider use of data and the utilization of data and automation obtained with the help of data has been one of the core promises of our own services.

Key actions we took in 2020

During the second and third quarter of the year, while COVID shock phase was on globally, we decided to make all our eLearning content with ‘Growth Academy’ and 'Ecosystem Development Academy' free for the world. As an immediate action to start contributing towards new business creation and to help bounce back economies via ecosystem development knowledge and tools. 

Towards end of 2020, driven by market changes and acceleration of all digital aspects in the markets, we made a strategic decisions to accelerate our focus from consulting approach to growth via digital solutions approach.

Along with this decision, we decided to reorganize our activities into a new company, Digiole Oy. To further focus on international growth with digital solutions. Digiole enables more clear structure and divide between Startup Commons innovation entrepreneurship ecosystem development activities and more broadly applicable digital solutions development under different brands and activities;

• where activities under Startup Commons brand are more focused on local and geographically focused ecosystem development needs, often driven by public sector and non profit activities in the early part of the startup journeys,
• and where activities under Digiole brand we can more clearly focus on digital services development, focus on globally crossing business vertical ecosystem development. Also development of digital platform economy, platforms & digital ecosystems, will start as a new products & services category under Digiole, where international private companies emerge as a new customer segment.

This will further enable us to also better support all of our open source services and offerings and also gives room for future shareholders, and investors to join us going forward.

2021

For 2021, our commitment for ecosystem development and digital transformation is stronger than ever. This is most clearly visible via our first collaborative ecosystem development project approach (see video presentation here), that we are focused to carry out starting on the first part of the year. ​​​