Startup studios and parallel entrepreneurship are emerging

Building a business is no easy feat. While some may think dedication is enough to come out on top, a plethora of other assets are also necessary. Funds and the willingness to try can get you started, but you will need a certain degree of knowledge when push comes to shove.

This is where startup studios come to your aid.

A startup studio is a company that builds multiple startups in parallel and helps them stand out from the masses.

Through resource pooling, infrastructure, established teams and a methodical approach, these studios take an idea and turn it into a functional company with a working product or service. Multiple projects are nursed at the same time, with teams and managers only working on one or two cases at a time.

Startup studios are all about human capital in the same way a lot of Finnish startups are. When startups fail, the team is usually scattered, but there is no need for this. The startup studio model allows teams to trash the ideas that don’t work, retain expertise within the team, and redeploy them in a new business idea. This ensures knowledge, talent, skill, ability, experience, intelligence, training, judgment and wisdom stays in the studio and in the team.

The studio model has a lot of synergies. By re-using infrastructure, software and best practices across startups and choosing projects in overlapping spaces and customer segments accelerates the time to market and makes finding a product/market-fit faster and more accurate.

Startup studios are an emerging trend, especially in Europe and North America. They aim to help entrepreneurs and innovators build ventures more successfully than going it alone.

Here in Finland, startup studios are still rather unknown and underutilised as a way to grow businesses. Yet, the Finnish society and entrepreneurism have all the qualities needed to create amazing startup studios and make them flourish.