CLIENT
Encore is one of Finland’s leading waste management companies. Founded in 1943 as Paperinkeräys, the company had built its business around paper recycling before digitalisation fundamentally changed the availability of recycled paper and the dynamics of the industry.
At the same time, new technologies, servitisation, changing customer expectations and industry consolidation were reshaping waste management. Encore had already begun its transition towards a broader circular economy business, but the next phase required more than adapting its existing services.
Co-founders was invited to help Encore find new growth opportunities and strengthen its transition towards a more agile, digital and customer-focused company.
CHALLENGE
Encore was facing change from several directions at once. The decline of its traditional market coincided with new customer expectations and emerging business models that challenged established ways of operating.
The company needed to rethink both what value it could create for customers and how the organisation itself needed to change in order to deliver it.
The central question became:
How could Encore build new growth when both its market and the rules of the industry were changing?
PROCESS
We began by looking beyond existing industry assumptions and studying the everyday reality of Encore’s customers and employees. Through in-depth interviews, observation and close collaboration with the organisation, we combined human insight with an understanding of the wider strategic changes reshaping the industry.
As the work progressed, an important shift occurred. The challenge was not only to design better services around customer needs. We also identified organisational practices that were making Encore’s transition towards a more agile and customer-focused business more difficult.
Working closely with the leadership team and employees, we translated these insights into a new product and service direction and began developing new concepts through rapid experimentation with customers. Strategy, organisational development and service innovation became part of the same transformation rather than separate workstreams.
WHAT CHANGED
The work resulted in several new customer-focused services that were taken into use and continued to evolve through customer feedback and experimentation.
At the same time, Encore developed new capabilities for customer-centric and iterative service development. The collaboration therefore went beyond creating a new offering: it helped the organisation build a different way of developing its business in a changing market.
As CEO Petri Aaltonen described the collaboration:
“Co-founders’ work combines the understanding of the big, strategic picture, with the grassroots, human insights gathered from our customers. They have become a real extension of our team.”
