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.
Ia Adlercreutz founded Co-founders in 2016. Mikko-Pekka Hanski joined later as her partner. The people below make the work possible.
Partner, 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.
Partner
Mikko-Pekka is a partner at Co-founders and a 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.
New book
A new book follows Mikko-Pekka Hanski and Risto Lähdesmäki on their journey as the makers of Idean. The book is now published in Finnish, with the English edition on its way to market.
Kovat opit is the story of how two ordinary Finns, without the “right” background or a hero myth, built Idean, a growth company in digital design. The story leads, in the end, to the industry’s most historic acquisition.
The journey runs from Härmä to Silicon Valley, from Paris to Shanghai, from Jyväskylä to New York and from Texas to Tampere.
The first part is filled with big mistakes and almost self-destructive decisions, a proper slap from behind. In the second part, one of the founders moves to Silicon Valley: Idean rises to world-class, with clients including Apple, IBM, Amazon, HP and Nike. The third part tells what happens once the company is sold and the award for persistence is collected: what success changes and what it does not.
Every chapter ends with concrete, everyday instructions. They lead you to ask the right questions and make decisions that save time and spare you the fumbling.
Risto Lähdesmäki is one of the founders of Idean and its CEO, an entrepreneur and a curious investor who looks for the next big idea, hands in the soil, at the intersection of AI, growth and humanity.
Mikko-Pekka Hanski is one of the founders of Idean. Today he works at Co-founders and as an investor, and cultural envoy in the Cultural Forces of Ukraine and Nordic Cultural Forces.
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 Unilever’s award-winning Catalyst programme. Alastair works with leaders on listening beyond words, a discipline drawn from music, gardening and hostage negotiation as much as from business. He brings the training behind that capacity: listening practised where not hearing carries a real cost.
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.
In the first conversation, we discuss what you need to achieve, what is getting in the way and whether we could help.
Ia Adlercreutz
+358 50 599 3832
Mikko-Pekka Hanski
+358 41 535 3281