This thesis is a design development project for Lungo Oy, with the purpose and objective of documenting, planning and carrying out the process of founding and developing a new business venture by themeans of design thinking, conscious branding, and futures thinking.

Lungo is a startup offering relocation, language and culture education services for new international recruits within Finnish creative industries. The beneficiaries of this thesis are the founders and employees of Lungo, who have commissioned this development task. The researcher has participated in the design process, which is conducted in the form of an action research with cycles of planning, action, and evaluation. These cycles have taken place within the curriculum and scope of various study courses at Laurea UAS, Turku UAS, and an Education Bootcamp business incubator program organized by Helsinki Think Company in 2017 and 2018.

The design process combines theory and methods with the researcher-designer’s knowledge and experience base and design mindset. The chosen methods used in the thesis are typical service design methods that have been utilized and presented in various hackathons, handbooks, and service design toolboxes. They have been implemented in business design, branding and visual design cycles. These methods have been applied to create the essential elements for a new venture in the Finnish service ecosystem. The main results or outcome of the project has been a functioning new company with a brand and a visual identity, a business strategy and a future-oriented network design.

The service design process and methods have proven to be a useful approach to visualizing the customer and end user of the service, the service structure, and brand identity. Applying design thinking in several cycles along the way has helped to founders to crystallise the vision, focus, and purpose of Lungo.

This thesis contributes to the business growth management studies by exploring growth from multiple angles: firstly, the growth and development of career changers into first-time entrepreneurs and service innovators; secondly, the creation of a new business; thirdly, by adding value to the Finnish creative industry ecosystem, and finally, by adding qualitative value through the increased wellbeing of the recipients of this particular service.