Reimagining Collaborative Innovation with Co:tunity

About

Kairos Future is an international consulting and research company that helps organizations understand and shape their future through trend analysis, innovation, strategy, and AI-driven analytics. Founded in 1993 and headquartered in Stockholm, Kairos Future has offices and partners around the world, enabling them to turn big-picture insights into concrete actions for their clients.

One of their innovative solutions is Co:tunity, a unique multi-functional smartphone application and web-based platform for collaborative trendspotting and innovation. Co:tunity allows users to easily gather, share, and develop trends and ideas, analyze and report within the same digital platform. Whether launching a new product, reaching a new target group, or engaging coworkers, Co:tunity offers an end-to-end suite for innovation and foresight, enabling users to gather trends and insights, co-create concepts, and facilitate foresight processes with ease.

Challenges

Kairos Future set a strategic challenge to revitalize their crowdsourcing platform, Co:tunity. The platform needed to manage problem-solving and future analysis efficiently while being scalable, reliable, and user-friendly. Our collaboration with Kairos Future began over a decade ago, initially as a support project where we inherited the legacy system. Due to recommendations from several clients in Sweden and our excellent support, we gained their trust and were entrusted with major improvements and continuous development.

The main challenges were:

• Refactor the project code.
• Add new functionality.
• Enhance scalability.
• Improve the web version and the iOS application.
• Separate frequently updated sub-projects into autonomous instances.

Solutions

To address these challenges, we implemented the following solutions:

1. Refactor and Update:

   • Refactored the existing project code to improve quality and performance.
   • Updated the platform to enhance stability and reliability.

2. New Functionality:

   • Enabled the platform to take ideas from early drafts to fully developed business cases.
   • Implemented features for sharing, voting, and commenting on ideas.
   • Introduced Idea Teams to facilitate collaborative creation of innovative products and services.

3. Scalability and Delivery:

   • Made the application more scalable to handle increasing user demands.
   • Set up a fast feature delivery cycle for quicker updates and improvements.
   • Migrated the platform to Azure for better performance and scalability.
   • Integrated AI to enhance the platform’s capabilities.

4. Mobile Application:

   • Complemented the platform with a mobile application based on Ionic, expanding user accessibility and engagement.

5. Maintenance and Support:

   • Provided ongoing maintenance services to ensure platform stability and performance.
   • Our support has kept the platform robust through several design upgrades and major technology changes.

Results

Our efforts culminated in a new version of the Co:tunity platform that not only met but exceeded our client’s requirements. Key achievements include:

• Modern UI/UX: We delivered a platform with a modern user interface and user experience, enhancing usability and engagement.
• Partnership Model: Our relationship with Kairos Future evolved into a partnership model, leading to over a decade of successful cooperation.
• Client Satisfaction: Improved application quality increased the percentage of satisfied stakeholders.
• Enduring Support: The platform’s stability and performance have remained high, with our ongoing support contributing to a strong client retention rate.

Kairos Future chose us based on recommendations from several clients in Sweden, recognizing our expertise in building complex SaaS platforms using .NET and Azure. The Co:tunity project is a testament to our ability to deliver innovative, scalable, and reliable solutions, and our long-term commitment to client success.

Technology Stack