People
Co-founders was built for the moment when a leadership team’s familiar ways of thinking stop producing a next move. The work is systematic: to step deliberately outside everyday thinking, and to return with something usable, a new interpretation, a way forward, a decision or a direction the standard process would not have produced.
The practice has ten years behind it. The people below are the ones who make the work possible.
Founder, CEO
Ia is the founder and CEO of Co-founders, a consultancy that helps boards and executive teams align strategy, company culture and human creativity in periods of change. She brings more than 20 years of leadership experience from Nordic and global companies such as Kekkilä, Fiskars and Harvia, most of it at board level.
Alongside her work with companies, Ia is Professor of Practice at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, where she contributes to the work of the Artpreneurship research group. Her research explores how artistic creativity strengthens leadership and a company’s capacity to develop new directions.
A third-generation entrepreneur, a part-time farmer and a mother of five, she has also spent years running political campaigns. Business, farming and public life each ask something different, and she has worked inside all three. Together they give her a rare capacity to view life, business and society through many different lenses.
Founder
Mikko-Pekka is the founder of Idean, a global design studio acquired by Capgemini in 2017. Today he is building Solovey Music, a Finnish-Ukrainian cultural platform, and Double Tap Investments, which backs Ukrainian defense tech founders. He is also a proud member of the Cultural Forces of Ukraine, the association whose model he and Ia followed when they founded Cultural Forces of Finland.
He is an author, an all-around curious board member and a father of three, and holds one belief: culture is the most underused superpower in geopolitics.
His board roles are in three very different worlds: he chairs YTK, Finland’s largest unemployment fund, and the Children and Youth Foundation, and is a board member at Kovanen Capital, a family office.
Founded in 2016.
For over 10 years we have sat with executive teams of listed and family-owned companies through strategy shifts, ownership changes, integrations and category shifts, and published what we learned as we went.
That record is not left behind. Every article, white paper and study is here in full, with its original date and author intact. What has sharpened over the decade is what we are for.
London. Berlin. Copenhagen. Barcelona.
The boards we work with sit inside groups running across borders. The room that needs challenging is rarely in one country. Our international advisors are practitioners in their own right; we bring them into the work when the question calls for the outside eye a single national practice cannot supply.
London
Founder of Creamer & Co. (London / New York), and the mind behind the award-winning Catalyst programme at Unilever. Alastair works with leaders on the practice of listening beyond words, a discipline drawn as much from music, gardening and hostage negotiation as from business. He is our voice for what an executive team stops hearing about itself.
Berlin
Doctor in Neuroscience, founder of phi360 and chairman of the Biomimicry Academy. Arndt works at the intersection of biology, systems thinking and organisational design, and is a TEDx voice on future-proofing companies. In our work with boards, he brings a way of reading structural fear in a room, the neurological reason certain questions become unspeakable.
Copenhagen
A designer by training who spent two decades leading her own studio before turning full-time to culture and board work. Dorte has learned that the difference between a company’s good years and bad years is almost never strategy; it is culture, and specifically the quality of listening a chair sets from the top. She takes leaders on hiking trips in Greenland when the boardroom is not enough.
Barcelona
Twenty years of strategy and branding work across publishing, finance, food packaging, lighting, maritime tech and art, from Romania to Spain, Belgium and Finland, and back to Spain. She is now taking a second degree in Psychology at the International University of Valencia, deepening her reading of human behaviour and building services that help clients lead toward the future they want.
Call us when you know something needs to change, but the way forward is not yet clear.
Ia Adlercreutz
+358 50 599 3832
Mikko-Pekka Hanski
+358 41 535 3281