Shaping next generation institutions, businesses & brands
ABOUT US
Poem is a strategy, insight, and innovation partner for institutions, businesses, and brands. We use systems intelligence and cultural sensemaking to help you grow and evolve with relevance and meaning.
Strategy with Systems Intelligence
To stay relevant and resourceful, institutions and businesses need more than traditional strategy. They need adaptive strategic and operational systems for business, brand, offerings, and partnerships that flex with cultural change, AI disruption, economic instability, and climate imperatives.
With systems intelligence, we shape how organizations work, grow, and build meaningful relationships. Drawing on leading practices from social science, cultural studies, strategic design, strategic foresight, business strategy, sustainability, complexity science, and organizational design, we connect the dots, trace the patterns, and move the whole forward.
Deep in the Cultural Layers
Our name, Poem, reflects both poetry, the art of shaping language into meaning, and poiesis, the creative act of bringing something entirely new into being.
This dual nature—synthesizing meaning and creating new realities—has guided our work for nearly 15 years. We’ve worked in the trenches of cultural, technological, and creative transformation, actively making sense and shaping the layered realities, experiences, meanings, and systems that unfold across physical and digital cultural spaces.
Founded in New York in 2011 and now based in Helsinki, Finland, we work globally to redefine what cultural institutions, businesses, and brands can become.
Questions we’ve helped answer:
How can an ART MUSEUM operate as a MEDIA STUDIO AND PLATFORM? — How do you reinvent the BUSINESS MODEL of a MUSIC HALL for the next era? — How does a DESIGN BRAND grow by enabling BETTER WAYS OF LIVING? — In what ways an ART BIENNIAL can connect with a new generation of PARTNERS AND FUNDERS? — What does a credible PATH TO SUSTAINABILITY look like for an ART UNIVERSITY? — What role can a TECH COMPANY play in IMPROVING LIFE for billions?
OUR OFFERING
We help organizations adapt and evolve through shaping and shifting their operational systems. Our Strategy Systems shape pathways for good growth, Insight Systems surface new opportunity, and Innovation Systems bring new worlds to life.
Strategy Systems
Reframe the narrative and design models for growth.
Institutions, businesses, and brands partner with us to develop adaptive growth strategies, brand evolutions, change trajectories, and partnership models that are responsive to shifting systems and grounded in cultural relevance.
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Our systems approach for strategy might be right for you when:
> You’re entering a new phase: expanding, repositioning, or evolving through strategic or spatial change.
> You’re rethinking your business model, brand strategy, or partnerships to stay relevant in a shifting landscape.
> You want to align growth with cultural, social, or ecological value, without compromising ambition or impact.
> You’re looking for new markets, narratives, or alliances that open future-fit pathways for impact and engagement.
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We use system-shifting strategy, strategic design, and foresight to help organizations design adaptive models for organizational evolution, business growth, and brand transformation.
Our Strategy Systems approach combines vision setting, narrative reframing, and strategic modeling to define clear trajectories of change. We work with teams to align around shared missions, identify leverage points, and define a portfolio of initiatives that can shape markets, shift systems, and realize long-term impact.
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We worked with HAM Helsinki Art Museum in 2024 to identify growth opportunities in relation to a new museum building. The results included a future growth framework for HAM that defines strategic directions for its business model, supporting financial sustainability and the successful expansion into new facilities.
We also collaborated in 2024 with HAM’s Helsinki Biennial, the leading Nordic art event, creating a mission-driven partnership and fundraising model. The work opened the biennial long-term, high-value opportunities for partnerships that align with the Biennial’s and Helsinki’s cultural vision.
Insight Systems
Make sense of change and know your opportunity.
Leaders and teams turn to us to understand how social, cultural, and technological shifts are reshaping their environment. We surface insights into meanings, patterns, and relations that matter. And identify opportunities for growth, relevance, and impact.
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Our systems approach for insights might be right for you when:
> You’re facing change through shifting markets, emerging technologies, or socio-cultural transformation.
> You’re seeking updated or deeper insight into your customers and audiences: their needs, desires, behaviors, and motivations.
> You want to uncover new opportunities and align your strategy with what matters most.
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We use systems intelligence and cultural insight to reveal what’s changing and why it matters for you. From emerging value creation logics to new meanings, deeper desires, and untapped alliances, we surface the shifts that shape relevance and unlock growth.
Our Insight Systems method draws on social science, cultural studies, strategic foresight, and complexity thinking to identify patterns and open new strategic directions.
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We mapped future opportunity areas from a human perspective with Iittala, the quintessential Nordic design brand.
The result was the Map of Better Living, a systems view of five core life domains and related everyday practices where Iittala can meaningfully contribute.
This work helped Iittala identify new growth areas and evolve from a product-first company into a mission-led lifestyle brand.
READ MORE ABOUT CASE IITTALA
Innovation Systems
Build and launch what matters.
Institutions and businesses work with us to shape new offerings, programs, platforms, exhibitions, and experiences with strategic depth. To create what should exist, generate new revenue streams, and deliver distinctive formats.
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Our systems approach for innovation might be right for you when:
> You’re ready to move from strategy to implementation, from vision to reality.
> You want to develop new offerings, services, or formats that respond to shifting behaviors.
> You’re launching a new initiative, space, or platform and want to ensure cultural relevance and deep audience resonance.
> You need to prototype, test, and refine before scaling what matters with confidence.
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We apply cultural analysis, strategic design methods to imagine and shape what doesn’t yet exist, but should.
Innovation Systems help organizations develop connected experiences, formats, and platforms that respond to deeper cultural needs and future-facing opportunities.
We work across conceptual, experiential, and systemic layers, designing offerings, prototyping ideas, and preparing them for activation and implementation through collaborative processes and strategic alignment.
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We built the digital museum concept and new media studio model for the Finnish National Gallery, Ateneum Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma.
Together, we reinvented how museums operate and engage in the digital realm beyond virtual environments and social media. Using a worlding framework, we developed a cohesive way to lead with digital art and integrate media-native thinking into exhibitions, programming, and public engagement.
The result was a people-first digital museum concept and operating model that expands reach, deepens audience connection, and opens new creative and revenue opportunities.
OUR WORK
We collaborate with leading museums and art institutions, technology and lifestyle companies, as well as public and cultural organizations. Here are some of our clients.
MUSEUMS AND ART INSTITUTIONS
TECH AND LIFESTYLE COMPANIES
PUBLIC AND CULTURAL ORGANIZATIONS
OUR THINKING
2025 Cultural Codex
What does it take to stay relevant when culture, markets, and the world feel like they’re getting stranger by the day?
We’ve spent the past year exploring that question through our work with institutions like Kiasma, Ateneum, Amos Rex, Helsinki Biennial, HAM Helsinki Art Museum, and beyond.
We’ve distilled three core strategies into the 2025 Cultural Codex, a playbook for cultural institutions and culture-first businesses.
Each strategy includes six strategic plays, illustrated with examples and grounded in a case study from our work.
Get the publication by signing up below.
Circular Design Guidebook
Written by Ville Tikka for Design Forum Finland, the Circular Design Guidebook (2025) brings together diverse design disciplines to help institutions and businesses integrate circular economy principles into their strategy and operations.
The book provides models, frameworks, actionable instructions, and real-world examples for designing sustainable and regenerative solutions. One product, service, and business model at a time.
The guidebook is aimed for leaders, product and service developers, and design professionals looking to understand and apply the fundamentals of circular design.
The New Wave of Design
The New Wave of Finnish Design brings the story of Finnish design into the 21st century, showcasing the latest in contemporary Finnish design.
The book explores what design means today and how it can create value and significance in a changing world. It highlights ten diverse examples of the new wave: from products and digital services to AI-driven platforms, brand experiences that foster communities, business models that advance social good, and dynamic organizational cultures.
Selected articles
Worlding as Cultural Production – The new primary mode of creative expression and commercial opportunity
Becoming a Comet – Or how to design benevolent Artificial Intelligences
Introducing Impact OS – Operating system for good growth
CONTACT US
Ville Tikka
Strategy Lead
Phone +358 4068 40656
Email ville@poem.company
Poem is led by Ville Tikka, a strategist and advisor to leadership, strategy, and creative teams across sectors ranging from art and culture to technology, lifestyle, and the public sphere.
Before moving into consulting, Ville led strategic innovation and foresight projects as a Senior Futures Specialist at Nokia Design’s Insight & Innovation unit, working from New York, London, and Helsinki across five continents with global business, design, and brand teams.
He has written extensively on the future of cultural institutions, strategic and circular design, and business transformation. His work expands to curating exhibitions, exploring AI ethics and world-building in web3.
Ville holds an MA in Psychology and Media Studies from the University of Turku and has pursued PhD studies at Aalto University’s School of Arts, Design and Architecture.
