22. Strategic Business Examples from Finland: The Growth of the Smartup Industry

The transition to a carbon neutral and resource smart society is perhaps the largest societal transformation of our time. There is an urgent need to develop scalable solutions, which help individuals lead sustainable lives and radically reduce ecological footprints. The promising news is that there is a whole new branch of startups, small and medium-sized enterprises (SME’s) and also larger companies creating new solutions to these challenges. We call these ‘smartups’. Recently, smartups have emerged to provide new products and services particularly in the areas of housing, mobility and food. These three essential sectors are where most of our household material footprint originates from as well as the majority of monthly expenses. Therefore, solutions are needed dissolve the link, even a dependency, between the majority of household consumption and the root causes of emissions. Smartups are able to solve this dependency by providing cheaper, better and more ecological solutions in the areas that we spend most of our money in the first place.

This article explains what smartups are, focusing on their business models and what is needed to make them successful. We introduce two promising smartups in the food sector from Finland and analyse the reasons for their potential and success. We find that globally emerging smartups will only be successful if their added value is based both on making individual lives easier, happier and more comfortable while simultaneously enabling the transition to an ecologically sound lifestyle. Smartups can disrupt markets and create new ones, but the growth of the industry is dependent on determined support. Thus, we suggest that one of the best ways to support the development of smart concepts is to create strategic partnerships between smartups and the existing large companies.