Catalyse action: Acceleration model for businesses

Overview

The Smart everyday development programme was created in order to help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that operate with a sustainable business model to better understand their customers and grow their business. The programme was built around rapid business experiments to develop and introduce sustainable products to large customer groups and not only the niche segments targeted at eco-consumers.

The development programme scale was limited to 10 SMEs and 10 large consumer companies.

In the programme, each pair, consisting of an SME and a large company, planned experiments together so that both organisations could learn from each other and together find out how to develop new sustainable business. The goal of the experiments was to develop initial ideas into market-ready concepts and validate their business value with target consumer groups identified with the help of the large companies.

Payoffs

1. By engaging companies and doing good business with sustainable solutions, the positive impact can be scaled up.
2. By changing the markets and the share of sustainable options you will have a huge effect on social norms and achieve widespread emission reduction quicker.
3. The companies learned together about sustainable consumption and business models.

Results – Finland

• Thirty experiments aimed at achieving thriving and sustainable business. Increased business development competence. Validated business models, MVPs and prototypes, which were developed further in collaboration after the programme. Business growth experienced by the best performers in the first year after the programme of 50%.

Download the method as a pdf version: Catalyse action: Acceleration model for businesses (pdf)