Insights make sense of complexity. Through interdisciplinary research, we map the systems of emerging behaviors, shifting meanings, and evolving value logics that reshape relevance and opportunity.
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Cultural Insight and Analysis: Interpret emerging values, identities, symbolic meaning, and the cultural logics shaping relevance.
Audience and Customer Understanding: Clarify needs, motivations, barriers, and behaviors with qualitative depth and real-world context.
Market Opportunities and Value Creation: Identify new markets, revenue models, partnerships, and value-creation architectures.
Future Mapping and Scenarios: Make sense of signals and patterns to explore plausible directions and strategic possibilities.
Our Insights Offering
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New cultural meanings: We identify how meanings change, how identities form, and what narratives shape relevance. This clarifies the cultural currents your work belongs to and the role you can play within them.
New human desires: We uncover the deeper transformations people seek and the emotional, social, and symbolic motivations that guide participation and decision making.
New value logics: We reveal how value is now created, perceived, and exchanged, where cultural and financial value converge, and what makes new offerings compelling.
What Insights Reveal
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Cultural interpretation and narrative sensing: We use cultural analysis, semiotics, narrative mapping, and media scanning to interpret identities, symbols, tensions, and emerging story arcs.
Human understanding and qualitative immersion: We apply ethnography, deep interviews, field observation, and embodied co-experiments to reveal motivations, frictions, and desires that are not yet articulated.
Value architecture and ecosystem modeling: We analyze market patterns, value architectures, and system dynamics to surface how value is created, exchanged, and sustained across networks of actors.
How We Uncover Insights
We work with brands, cultural institutions, and businesses to make sense of their worlds: human experience, cultural shift, and market dynamics.
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Together with Iittala’s leadership, we defined a renewed brand purpose: “Inspiring better living.”
Through cultural analysis and applied ethnography, we explored how the brand can meaningfully contribute to everyday life in ways that reflect Nordic values and contemporary needs.
At the core is The Map of Better Living, a systemic insight framework that identifies five opportunity areas: coexisting with nature at home, creating sanctuary, belonging together, living with clarity, and growing as a person. Each area is grounded in values such as humanity, autonomy, sustainability, equity, and trust.
This approach shifts Iittala from timeless objects to timely transformation. It positions the brand to support people in cultivating more balanced, joyful, and purposeful lives, while enabling coherent, insight-driven growth across products, services, and experiences.
Iittala
Map of Better Living
In addition to our consulting work, we publish original research that examines how culture, technology, and value creation are evolving.
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We’ve spent the past year exploring these strategies through our work with institutions like The New Architecture and Design Museum, Kiasma, Ateneum, Amos Rex, Helsinki Biennial, HAM Helsinki Art Museum, and beyond.
We distilled three core strategies: To remain relevant and resilient, you must go broader by worlding cultural worlds. deeper with cultural gravity, and longer through changing lives.
Each strategy includes six strategic plays, illustrated with examples and grounded in a case study from our work.
Download your copy of Cultural Codex 01 below.
Cultural Codex 01
Emerging value logics
We translate insights into capability through talks, workshops, training, and mentoring.
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The program introduced tools and frameworks from our Cultural Codex and Worlding methodology, helping participants understand cultural production as the building of broader worlds across mediums and time horizons. Through expert insight, collaborative exercises, and practical templates, teams learned how to sense emerging trends, model future opportunities, and apply cross-disciplinary approaches to business and creative development.
The training equipped media and creative companies with shared concepts, practical tools, and future-mapping templates to explore new partnerships, formats, and value creation models in a rapidly evolving landscape.
Fusion Labs
Mutating Worlds of Creative Industries
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The training program explored three strategic shifts shaping the field today: museums as media, services as core offerings, and mission as the operational foundation.
Through keynote sessions, practical frameworks, and shared experimentation, participants learned to reimagine audience relationships, prototype culture-led service ecosystems, and cultivate partnerships that sustain impact in a shifting world.
Each module focused on a core shift identified in our Museum Futures framework: Museums operating as media organizations, Services as core cultural and financial infrastructure, and Mission as a strategic driver for programming, partnerships, and governance.
Finnish Museums Association
Museum Futures
Insights Clients and Work
| Client | Work |
|---|---|
| Business Finland | Foresight, Market Opportunity |
| Confederation of Finnish Industries | Insights, Foresight |
| City of Helsinki | Foresight |
| European Commission | Foresight, Research |
| Growth Collective | Foresight, Training |
| Humak & Creve | Insights, Foresight, Training |
| Finnish Chamber of Commerce | Insights, Research |
| Finnish Cultural Institute in New York | Insights, Research |
| Finnish Museums Association | Foresight, Insights, Training |
| Fusion Labs | Insights, Foresight, Training |
| Helen | Foresight |
| Helsinki Biennial | Customer Insights |
| Iittala | Customer Insights, Research, Ethnography |
| KONE | Strategy Training |
| Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment | Foresight, Insights |
| Municipality & SMBs | Market Opportunity, Research |
| Nokia | Foresight, Market Opportunity, Customer Insights, Research, Ethnography |
| OP Bank | Foresight, Insights, Research |
| Reaktor | Foresight, Insights, Research |
| Senate Properties | Insights, Research |
| Suunto | Foresight, Insights |
| The Finnish Youth Housing Association NAL | Customer Insights, Research, Ethnography |
| Yle – Finnish Broadcasting Company | Foresight, Insights |
| YTK Fund | Market Opportunity, Foresight, Customer Insights, Research, Ethnography |