Our Services
For Corporations
Most corporate innovation work stalls in one of four places: strategy that never reaches execution, programs that can’t survive three months without the person who championed them, pilots that go nowhere, or product teams with no process and no mandate.
We’ve watched each of those happen more than once. That’s why an innovation strategy from us doesn’t stop at the strategy: it arrives with the organizational structures, the programs, the team capabilities, the procedures and the change management that decide whether any of it survives contact with the organization.
How far inside we go is your call. Some clients want the thinking and will run it themselves. Others want us in the room, doing the work alongside their people. We’re not shy about going in and building the system from the inside out.
For internal corporate innovation we have designed and implemented programs of every shape: ideation formats such as Kickbox, in-house hackathons, internal accelerators, pitch and validation training, corporate venture studios, and the frameworks that turn an approved idea into an actual product.
For external innovation programs, understanding startups is the whole game. We mentor them regularly and some of us have worked inside them, so we know how they operate and how founders think. That makes us useful on both sides of the table. We build fair and efficient frameworks for finding, selecting and piloting startups, and we do the translation that has to go with them — what a startup can realistically commit to, how it actually works, and how a corporate team should talk to one. The collaboration produces real decisions rather than another pitch day.
We have delivered transformative work for A1 Serbia, UniCredit Bank, Raiffeisen Bank, OTP Bank, NIS, Erste Leasing (formerly S Leasing), Mercator-S and others, across telecommunications, energy, retail, distribution, banking and pharma.
Most of those engagements ran through ICT Hub, before Zavisi existed: Sandra led the innovation consultancy there, Bojan and Luka delivered as independent consultants. Same people, same work, different letterhead. The A1 partnership program was contracted directly.
Where we come in
Problems we solve
We need to innovate, but everything we try turns into theater
We refuse the activity-with-no-follow-through model. Every engagement ends in a decision: what gets funded, what gets killed, and who owns it.
We want to work with startups but have no way to choose or pilot them
We build the selection framework, the scoring, the pilot governance and the portfolio management, then run the first cycles with you until your own people can run them.
Ideas come from our people and nothing happens to them
We give bottom-up ideas somewhere to go: a structured program that takes them through lean testing in days and weeks, not months and quarters.
We ran a program once, but it died when the consultants left
We train your internal staff as we go and hand over the criteria, the curriculum and the governance, so the second cycle doesn't need us.
Our product people have no process or prioritization for innovative projects
We work inside the team to stabilize it. Clear ownership, a prioritization process, and product practices that fit your business instead of a textbook.
Everyone says we need an AI strategy and nobody can say what would actually change
When it comes to AI, it's not about tooling, it's about business needs and processes. We help you build a framework for working out which parts of how you operate stop making sense with AI in the building, what gets rebuilt, what gets retired, and who decides.
Something else, or I'm not sure which of these it is
Start a conversation. If we don't think we can deliver meaningful value, we'll tell you upfront.
Our position
AI Evolution
We've been around long enough to watch corporations go through digital transformation, then hunt for something — anything — to use blockchain for, then edge cautiously toward the metaverse without ever really entering it. AI is not in that second category. AI is closer to what digital transformation was: real, structural, and here to stay. What it isn't is the revolution the AI industry is selling.
AI initiatives fail the way digital transformation and innovation programs always have. The tool arrives, the thinking doesn't change. Prompt training and a chatbot pilot leave you doing the old work slightly faster.
The question worth answering is which parts of how you operate stop making sense with AI in the building.
What gets rebuilt. What gets retired. Who decides. That is the evolution AI actually brings, and it's a business design problem rather than a tooling one. It's the one we work on today.
Selected work
What that looked like
Banking, telecommunications, FMCG, energy, retail and distribution — from a single team to a group-wide program.
A1 Serbia · EBRD-backed
Serbia's first corporate-startup partnership program
Challenge: A telecom leader wanted to work with startups for real — beyond innovation theater — but had no framework for selecting, piloting and integrating them. What we did: Engaged directly by A1 to design and run the program end to end across three thematic cycles (B2B, retail, hospitality) — market scouting, selection framework, evaluation and scoring, pilot governance and portfolio management. Outcome: Each cycle scouted its market from scratch: the hospitality cycle alone screened 79 companies across 11 product categories down to eight shortlisted for cooperation. Every pilot ended in an explicit go/no-go, and two — B2BEE and Tau Commerce — completed successfully and went into A1's commercial portfolio.
A1 Serbia · Tvoje Messto internal innovation program
Where employee ideas finally had somewhere to go
Challenge: A1 wanted one place for employees to bring ideas and a route from there to execution. Collecting ideas was never the hard part — the hard part is what happens to an approved one when the organization has no way to absorb it. What we did: Designed the program and ran it across five cycles: education, coaching, idea bootcamps, hands-on work with teams through validation and testing, and a final pitch to A1's Innovation Board. Delivered alongside A1's own mentors, with our people in the room for the implementation phases. Outcome: A framework for landing selected ideas into the existing product lines, so an approved idea gets a team, a process and an owner rather than a certificate. Five cycles run, with ideas reaching implementation from the first one.
NELT Group
Rescuing a product management function
Challenge: The region's largest distribution group had its product function in disarray, with no process for prioritization. What we did: Hands-on work inside the team to stabilize the role — clear ownership, a prioritization process, and product practices that fit a distribution business. Outcome: A functioning product management practice the organization could build on.
OTP Bank · internal innovation challenge
An innovation challenge the client now runs alone
Challenge: The bank wanted to run an internal innovation idea challenge but had no program structure, no evaluation criteria, and nobody trained to carry it past a one-off event. What we did: Built the program with the client from the ground up — education cycle, selection criteria, trained internal staff — and ran the first two rounds hands-on. Outcome: A program now run entirely in-house, and easily adjusted to whatever the corporate priorities are each cycle.
Mercator-S · innovation challenge
Bottom-up employee ideas, tested in days
Challenge: Employee ideas were coming in from the bottom up, but there was no structured way to actually address or act on them. What we did: Delivered a program that culminated in a three-day innovation sprint. Outcome: Employee ideas now run through lean methodology quickly — tested and validated in days, not months.
Via Normale · internal venture, A1 Serbia
Taking an internal innovation idea to market
Challenge: An internal team at A1 Serbia had developed a promising idea through the company's internal innovation program, but lacked the structured process to validate it with real users, define the product clearly, and navigate the path from concept to a market-ready solution. What we did: Mentored the internal team through customer and product discovery — mapping user needs, defining target use cases, and identifying what would make the product genuinely useful rather than merely interesting. Ran market research to confirm the absence of comparable solutions, guided the team through problem-solution fit validation, and connected them with the right development resources. Outcome: Via Normale found its place in A1's ecosystem, launched on the Serbian market, and is recording real traction — curated and verified locations for independent nature exploration, reliable trail information, and the practical detail a user needs, in one place.
Šapice · internal venture, A1 Serbia
The venture that was right to stop
Challenge: An app for pet owners, mostly dog owners, had cleared validation and landed in standard product management. That was the problem: a product process built for telco services and their adjacencies was the wrong machinery for a consumer app. What we did: Worked with the team and their outsourced partner through several cycles — concept design, designing the validation, deciding what belonged in an MVP, the app itself, and a business model that had to work both for a consumer app and for what A1 can realistically bill and collect. Then the projections, and the harder job of reconciling what an app like this actually earns against what a corporation expects a project to return. Outcome: The projections didn't survive contact with corporate expectations. The venture was sunset before tens of thousands of euros went into building something A1 could neither sell nor properly own — a decision made on evidence rather than after the spend.
OTP Bank · OTP Connect
Designing a bank's entire open innovation ecosystem
Challenge: OTP Bank wanted to move beyond one-off innovation activities and build a structured, permanent channel for collaborating with startups and innovative companies — across formats ranging from commercial partnerships to co-development of new banking products. What we did: Designed OTP Connect from the ground up as a three-zone ecosystem: a Business zone for commercial partnerships, an R&D zone for co-developing banking products with startups and tech firms, and a Support zone for community programs and education. Built the program architecture, collaboration formats, selection criteria and governance model. Delivered through ICT Hub in partnership with OTP Bank. Outcome: OTP Connect launched as a live platform and has run continuously since — an open innovation ecosystem the bank operates independently, with an active pipeline across all three zones, and one of the most structured corporate-startup collaboration frameworks in Serbian banking.
Track record
