Practical Innovation for Resilient Businesses
"It depends." That's the most honest answer a consultant can give, and it's what our name means in Serbian. Every good problem solver says it before offering a solution, because the best answers only come after truly understanding the problem.
The three of us worked together for nearly five years before we started Zavisi in 2024. We built a track record designing and delivering innovation engagements side by side, and discovered something important along the way: we challenge each other well, we think differently enough to be useful to one another, and we share the same standards, working principles and ethics.
We came to this work from different angles: corporate innovation strategy, startup validation, product and go-to-market. The observation that drove us is the same, though: both startups and corporations struggle with innovation, just for different reasons. Startups build products nobody wants because they skip validation. Corporations run programs that look impressive and change nothing, which is what we call innovation theater.
Zavisi exists to fix both. We combine the agility and resourcefulness of the startup world with the rigor and structure that serious organizations require. Our engagements have been commissioned by EBRD, GIZ, UNDP, the World Bank Group and OECD/SIGMA. We've supported more than 300 startup and SME teams through national and regional programs, and delivered over 50 innovation projects across banking, telecommunications, energy and retail.
We're based in Novi Sad and Belgrade, active across the Western Balkans. Balkan resourcefulness, which is doing more with less and thinking clearly under constraint, paired with Western standards of methodology and delivery. That's the combination. That's Zavisi.
Our approach is built on three core principles:
Our name is Serbian for "it depends", and it's the honest answer to most consulting questions. Every engagement starts by working out what your situation actually is — the constraints, the budget, the people you have — before anyone proposes a method. Cookie-cutter programs fail for the same reason cookie-cutter products do.
How deep we go is your call. Some clients want the thinking and will run it themselves, which is a perfectly good way to work. Others want us inside the team — running the sessions, making the calls, doing the unglamorous parts. We're not afraid of that, and if it doesn't work, we're in the room for that too.
A deck is not an outcome. Validated demand is. A launched product is. A program your own people run is. We measure an engagement by what changed in your business, not by what we delivered into your inbox.
We've been founders, corporate innovation leaders, program managers, evaluators and mentors, often in the same year. When we tell you a plan won't survive contact with your organization, it's because we've watched one not survive ours.
Hackathons and idea challenges with nothing behind them are entertainment, and we won't run them. If a workshop is the plan and there's no commitment to act on what comes out of it, we'll say so before you spend the budget.
You'll know where you stand, including when it's bad news. We'd rather have an uncomfortable conversation in month one than a polite one in month six.
Zavisi is three founders and a standing network of consultants, trainers, domain experts and technical specialists we've delivered with for years — people we've worked beside, not names in a database. We scope the team to the engagement. No overhead to feed, no juniors billed at senior rates, and the people who sold you the work are the people who do it.
Every engagement hands over the working machinery: customer profiles, pricing models, playbooks, program criteria, selection frameworks — plus the training to run it. Not a report about what you should do: the thing itself, built so it can stand on its own. If your innovation capability depends on a consultant being available, you don't have a capability. You have a subscription.
A validated "no" saves more money than an enthusiastic "yes". We've told teams their concept would cost more time and money than they had, and helped corporations kill pilots that weren't working. You're paying for a straight answer, not a confirmation.
Founding Members
Corporate Innovation &
Commercialization
Senior innovation consultant and startup mentor who has spent almost two decades turning strategy into practice for corporations, SMEs and research teams.
More about SandraConnect with Sandra
Validation &
Startup Programs
Validation specialist with fifty-plus projects behind him, testing what people will pay for before the money is spent and what they actually do once it is.
More about LukaConnect with Luka
Go-to-Market &
Business Alignment
Go-to-market strategist with almost twenty years translating between engineering, product, marketing and sales — a job AI noise makes more important.
More about BojanConnect with BojanWhether you're a startup looking to validate your idea or a corporation ready to transform your innovation approach, we're here to help.
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