Polina Zavlyanova
Laura Riikonen
Thi Mai Anh Nguyen
Anja Anh Nguyen
Hanken School of Economics
Eva Nilsson
Martin Fougere
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Blokgarden’s innovation combines a pre-planted garden box with an educational application to guide every step of the gardening process. The innovation is developed to address the following Sustainable Development Goals (the SDGs): Good Health and Wellbeing by helping people to grow their food, Quality Education through the application’s instructions, Responsible Consumption via the collection of used boxes and soils as well as Sustainable Cities and Communities and Climate Actions by promoting urban farming.
A group of friends developed Blokgarden’s innovation with a shared gardening hobby at home. Blokgarden’s innovation covers every essential aspect of growing vegetables from scratch. The package is delivered with fresh soil, a well-designed box for urban farming, gardening tools, and seedlings. With the innovation, Blokgarden’s customers can grow fresh food on a balcony or a small courtyard. Growing your food improves health and well-being as you stay aware of all the chemicals the food may contain.
Blokgarden takes orders once a season, and all the orders are delivered simultaneously at the beginning of the season to reduce emissions and save fuel. Currently, the delivery location is set to be in Finland only.
Blokgarden’s innovation is targeted at people who do not have the appropriate skills for planting but have an interest in agriculture. The founders have built a mobile application to provide weekly instructions for the gardening process. The goal of the app is to educate people on how to garden. People can only grow a limited amount of food with the box, which promotes responsible consumption and reduces waste. “The Blokgarden team wishes that by rebalancing the demand for food and the turndown of cultivating, people could rekindle the relationship between mankind and nature” one of the co-founders of the company, Tuomas Ilander, said during the interview. The innovation was created to fight climate change by promoting a more sustainable lifestyle.
“People immigrating to the cities tend to prefer more green space in their homes as a sense of rootness” (Ramanathan 2017). Blokgarden’s founders have always been fond of growing plants, even though none are professional gardeners. During the summer of 2019, Ilander was discussing gardening problems with the other (future) co-founders of Blokgarden: zucchinis were frost-bitten, caterpillars attacked cabbages, and tomatoes were cracked. They were all frustrated with the poor-quality seeds and soil. “We came up with the idea that it would be marvelous and easier if someone would just bring us the ready-made boxes so we could start farming them.”
In addition to the preliminary idea of a gardening box, Ilander and the other co-founders decided to create a mobile application that would provide instructions for cultivation. The Blokgarden’s idea reached the European Space Agency’s business accelerator’s interest, and the company was officially registered in 2020. After the business started to operate, Ilander became increasingly motivated and inspired by customer feedback. “Several buyers reported that they did not have to buy cucumbers and tomatoes during the whole summer,” Ilander shares.
Although Blokgarden's story is still at the beginning, it has impacted its customers as well as the founders of the company. Blokgarden has helped approximately 1000-2000 people to get started with gardening. Not everyone has the skills or resources to grow their food from zero, which takes a lot of time and effort. The company enables everyone to grow their food with Blokgarden's garden box and guiding mobile application.
"People do get a lot of vegetables out of the boxes," Ilander says when asked about their innovation's (short-term) impacts. Ilander believes that the customers could be inspired to grow more and more of their food once they get an easy start with Blokgarden's boxes. One of the desired impacts is to increase the sense of community while people garden together, for example, by offering garden boxes to housing associations.
In the long term, the garden box can potentially reduce a significant amount of waste. Because it makes growing food easier, people are less likely to fail in their gardening and generate more waste. Moreover, since the summer in Finland is relatively short, when the fall comes, Blokgarden staff comes and picks up the boxes and recycles the soil. After composting the soil, Blokgarden can reuse it in the future. Finally, Ilander says that "the Blokgarden team is committed, and the company gives them joy."
Blokgarden was established from the idea of the garden box, so it is fair to say that the innovation has been the ultimate benefit of the business. Because Blokgarden is a new company and the innovation is unique, they are still seeking additional funding. Blokgarden has one full-time employee and a larger team working with their day job, but they hope to provide more full-time employment opportunities in the future.
Blokgarden was recently admitted to an accelerator program called PALO, which provides business support for startups, aiming to get them ready for investment more quickly. During the interview, Ilander says that “the team is very excited about being admitted to the accelerator program and looking forward to connecting with mentors of the program.” Through the program, Blokgarden will receive an investment to help them develop the business further.
Ilander sees potential for expansion, primarily through the guiding mobile application, eventually even to another countries. Due to the nature of the innovation, Blokgarden’s team will spend the upcoming winter developing further ideas and taking the company forward. Ilander believes that next spring will be their time to bloom.
Blokgarden’s garden box and the guiding application promote locally sourced food, which significantly impacts the environment and society. Locally sourced food is always fresh and safer as the consumer controls the planting process and is aware of the substances used in the process. Locally sourced food is also an act towards preventing climate change because it means a decrease in the transfer of food, which means fewer emissions.
Blokgarden’s application provides quality education to all users. The application guides the user on when and how to take care of the box garden. Using the application, users can also ask questions directly from the company’s experts. On top of teaching the users about gardening, Blokgarden’s innovation may educate people to better understand the value of food by growing their own food.
One of the goals of Blokgarden is to bring people together through gardening. Community gardening promotes deeper neighbor relations and creates encounters between people, which are essential aspects of a fulfilling life. The garden box could be especially beneficial in the housing associations for older or disabled people, who often suffer from the lack of natural encounters with other people.
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Blokgarden Oy (“Blokgarden”) is a limited liability company founded in Tampere, Finland, in early 2020 by a group of friends, Tuomas Ilander, Jarno Laitinen, and Rene Dekker. Blokgarden provides its customers with a garden box with pre-planted seedlings and a guiding application to enable them to grow their own food at home quickly. The innovation is designed for the people in Finland who wouldn’t otherwise have the time, skills, or resources to grow their food.