Ada Insights is written by Arhi Kivilahti.
I have a varied background in retailing. I have sought to understand and experience the industry from all perspectives.
The researcher
I started my career as a researcher in Aalto University. My initial research area was real estate economics. Initially I started to focus more on the retail real estate side of the sector. I built and managed numerous research projects related retail real estate and retailing. Alongside project management I coordinated a Doctoral School for Built Environment for more than five years.
Oxford
Within one project we had the possibility to move for a year to Oxford. I spent they year 2010-2011 as a visiting researcher in Saïd Business School. During that year I started to focus on online grocery retailing as the topic of my PhD Dissertation. It concentrated on the UK market and the emergence and evolution of online grocery retailing in UK from 1990s to 2011.
Industry Transformation Initiated by a Technological Innovation - Case of UK Grocery Retailing
LINK to the dissertation
Dissertation
Solita
After the dissertation I realised that I won’t become a researcher. A natural next step from academia was to move to consulting. In the spring of 2014 I started as a consultant in a digital consultancy Solita. In Solita I was involved in digital strategy projects and presentations. During the time I also wrote an industry report interviewing senior executives from majority of the biggest retailers in Finland. LINK to the report
Kesko
After a couple of years as a consultant, it was a natural time to move into the practical side of the retail industry. From Solita I moved to Kesko (the second biggest grocery retailer in Finland) to work as a development director for digital services. I was responsible for developing the new online store k-ruoka.fi along with the way the online business was set up. During that time I also worked to build collaboration with some international retailers, like Tesco, Waitrose and ICA.
Ada Fresh
The international collaboration showed where the online business was heading. That (along with the collaboration with K-entrepreneurs) inspired me to think about building something by myself. With two former Kesko colleagues we established an online grocery startup, Ada Fresh.
The idea behind Ada Fresh in 2018 was to build an online grocery business that lives alongside the everyday routines of the customer. With the traditional bricks and mortar grocery, customer can go in and buy the grocery whenever they want. For online grocery, customers need to change their deeply ingrained routines of going to the store and buy the grocery a day in advance.
Ada Fresh offered a two hour grocery delivery with a 3 € delivery fee and a 30 minute delivery window. The idea was not to build a quick commerce service, but a fully fledged online grocery business that delivered customers orders almost immediately.
Customer data indicated that customers start to think about dinner and going to the grocery store after the lunch. Between 13.00 and 15.00 people start to think about food. With Ada Fresh, customers could still replace going to the grocery store at 15.00 and still get food delivered before the dinner.
Some articles about Ada Fresh (in Finnish):
Talouselämä 8.8.2018
Tekniikka & Talous 15.8.2018
Kauppalehti 24.5.2019
Ada Insights
Ada Fresh was able to acquire encouraging amounts of customers, but our success with investors was not similar. Therefore, we ran out of money in 2019. Since then I have worked as an independent retail analyst, advisor and consultant within Ada Insights. More about the services offered by Ada Insights can be found here.
About us
As a former innovation researcher, I have always found it fascinating how some people are able to see things differently to the conventions of the times.
These people often combine multiple and non-traditional viewpoints to see the problems in a new light. More often than not, they are also people coming from non-conventional backgrounds and ignored by the establishment of the time or the industry.
According to Walter Isaacson Ada Lovelace epitomized all that as she became fascinated by the new calculating device built by Charles Babbage.
Ada Lovelace is said to have been the first person ever to write code and she was able to see (centuries in advance) how humans and computers could truly interact with each other.
As a woman in the 18th century Britain, Ada Lovelace was not considered as a credible scientist. Thus her work was forgotten for almost a century and found only in the 1940s by Alan Turing, the father of modern computing.
As a daughter of a famous poet Lord Byron and a mother with great fascination to mathematics, Ada Lovelace was able to instill in her a deep admiration to both sciences as well as arts.
Ada Insights is my tribute to those people who have an insatiable yearning for learning different kinds of thins, enabling them to combine non-conventional perspectives to provide with revolutionary perspectives. Ada Insights is also my tribute to people who are seen as outsiders by the traditional establishment.
“From her father came a poetic streak and from her mother a mathematical one, and it instilled in her a love for what she called “poetical science”.”
Almost 160 years after the death of Ada Lovelace, Steve Jobs emphasised the need to understand both arts and sciences. In his March 2011 speech at an Apple event he described the philosophy underpinning the success of Apple.
“It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.”
