Nicholas Coutts

Innovation Advisory Board Member, UNLEASH – Innovation Lab for SDGs

An expert in the design, development and marketing of services, he has developed tools, process and services that help companies go to market more effectively and efficiently.

He is particularly interested in methods of funding of very early-stage projects and the commercialisation of research and innovation and has developed an innovation toolkit. The toolkit is designed to increase the survivability of startups and hence reduce unemployment, especially of young people.

He has collaborated in raising of investment for early stage, medium and large companies and the development of a novel type of investment fund based on the use of the vectors to allocate funds across a large portfolio based on the rate at which value is being generated.

At IBM, Nicholas was Vice President, Global Distribution Channel Strategy, having been Director of Channels and Business Partner Management, EMEA, with a revenue of >$3bn of sales via business partners. This responsibility included the development and application of the methods and processes used by the brands, known as Routes to Market, to reach and support customers via the global network of 48,000 business partners. His team grew sales via distribution channels to over $4bn.

He is active in the design of innovation ecosystems and innovation districts and is developing ways of implementing innovation as a public service and measuring social, economic and environmental impacts of innovation programmes and projects.

Since 2003, Nicholas has been a partner of Business Finland (formerly Finpro), facilitating workshops on channel strategy and development and routes to market. His experience in channels include working as a value-added reseller, a systems integrator, a distributor and a vendor (IBM and HP).

Working with ETICoop in France more than 200 startups have been created since 2013 and as a coach for Unsung Heroes , UNLEASH – a global innovation lab which gathers top talents to collaborate on solutions that help meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and The Melton Foundation SDG Innovation Challenge

Nicholas is a Visiting Lecturer; past and current collaborations include: Imperial College (Management and Business for Computing Engineering; Design-led New Venture Creation); Imperial College Business School (executive education; IE&D MBA: Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Design) and the Royal College of Art (service design; IDE: innovation design engineering; GID: global innovation design; design enterprise) the Ecole Supérieure of Advanced Industrial Technologies (ESTIA) (masters in systemics), aalto University (executive education) and the University of Tampere (executive education: service design); University of Barcelona Business School (Masters in Business Innovation).

He has a Masters in economics, from King’s College, Cambridge and has interests in several early stage companies developing innovative products and services, including BlindMate, Claned, Plumis, Smartology and Waratek. He was awarded the Connect Poland Prize in August 2022 and has launched a startup in Poland (Sense IMS Sp z o o) to develop the toolkit for startup survival as an AI-enabled self-service platform.