What are the positive aspects of Ascend now being a part of Knowit’s Ecosystem?

Our guiding star as a company is: “Pushing boundaries and inspire change – for a more capable business world”. Our company consists of fifty exceptional consultants with a proven track record of making a significant mark of positive change, and they continue to be highly appreciated by our customers. However, there is enormous potential and needs out there that we, until now, have not been able to satisfy. We have been too few or lacked the necessary specific competence within certain areas of expertise to address these issues and questions. 

Being a part of Knowit’s ecosystem, we continue to run Ascend based on our core values; Inclusive leadership and a strong sense of entrepreneurship. The difference we will see onwards is foremost the access to other and broader competencies that we can offer to meet the needs of our customers. These competencies will not only open the door to opportunities in areas we do not reach today, but also yield opportunities to strengthen and consolidate existing areas of our business. For example, adding specific tech areas, design, marketing, and business psychology can help us strengthen our impact when leading complex change.

What trends affect your company and business right now?

As a consultant company, we are always affected by the ever-changing environment and trends that our customers experience. For example, the improved efficiency and technology sprung from the 5G development, cloud and hybrid working, cost efficiency due to the energy crisis, and cyber security are emerging trends on the market, to name a few. Therefore, to stay relevant, we must be responsive and flexible to a changing market and look for new ways of developing our offers with our customers to guide them in their current challenges.

Per Wallentin, CEO of Knowit and chairman of the board of “Techorganisationen Sverige”, predicts the energy crisis and inflation as yet another driver for accelerated digitalization. However, for an organization to succeed, we’d like to stress the importance of in-depth technical competencies and a broad business perspective – the recipe for success lies within the capability to master an efficient combination of the two. 

What are your future challenges?

To drive transformations successfully, one must combine various competencies and abilities and make these function efficiently. Merely possessing these competencies is not enough – one must find a robust cross-functional model to reach the best result.

Knowit’s model to encourage and enable collaboration between the companies relies on decentralized ownership without limiting organizational or incentive structures. Hence, the corporation is driven by genuine proactivity to provide the best we can offer the customers to help them navigate a complex and changing world. Then, based on the customers’ needs, we can use the power of a solid ecosystem to match those needs.

One of the challenges we’ll face, like always in a new context, will be to find our place in Knowit’s network and ensure that we can exchange benefits from the other companies and that they can expect similar from us. We are used to seeing and using the strength of working in a network-based context with a customer-centric mindset and are very much looking forward to exploring what power we can find in each other!

What’s the next step?

We’ve been talking about related capabilities based on the customers’ needs we see today, enabling us to use our complementary expertise in cyber security, law and AI, commercial excellence and e-commerce, digital marketing and sustainable business. We’ve already signed our first deal together and look forward to many more in the future!