Family entrepreneurship and heavy industry have a strong presence in Jouni Salo’s professional background. During his career Jouni has been strongly involved in Finnish ship technology industry and in his previous employment, Jouni was acting as an industry director for the maritime and logistics industry. He has also been involved in directing product development in a Finnish software company, which develops the safety and efficiency of the shipping business with machine-learning and data-intensive solutions.
Jouni’s educational background combines technical and business expertise. Transferring to Unikie felt like a natural step in Jouni’s career, since the role felt like a good combination of his areas of expertise and interests; industry-specific expertise from maritime and logistics industry, combined to business development.
“The choice of career comes from entrepreneurship”, Jouni tells and continues: “I like to think of things that we can do business with. When I see problems, I also see possible solutions in them. The technical side appears in the desire of constantly inventing new application areas by combining existing technologies”.
Supporting the business of autonomous vehicles and industry 4.0 solutions
Jouni’s responsibilities include finding and opening new markets and development of new methods.
“We at Unikie get to work with new things all the time, so it feels great that you can really go deep in your thoughts where we want to focus on and what we would want to do next”, Jouni says.
“Unikie is a small but fast-growing, agile company, so things move on a fast phase. There is a lot of freedom in the work, but it also brings certain responsibilities. There are not so clear boundaries in your work as there has been while working in larger corporations, so it’s important to collect feedback from your work and through that also try to limit on what you should do and where you focus on in your work”, Jouni tells.
Meetings bring structure to the days, but due to the flexible nature of the job Jouni is able to split his working day to smaller pieces. He has found that for him, focusing to the work in the evening works well and gives him the possibility to concentrate to tasks that require a lot of thinking.
“For me, innovation requires idleness, and at the evening after our house has quieted down, I can immerse myself into an unhurried, creative moment. You could think that this would disturb my sleeping, but for me this works contrarily. I can calm down, when I get to organize my thoughts to boxes that I work with during the next day”.
Unikie is working together for a common goal
Jouni started at Unikie in the beginning of February. He was expecting a fast phased environment, but the reality on how fast things are proceeding was still a bit surprising.
“During these 4 months that I have been at Unikie, we have hired almost 100 new employees and that’s a lot”, Jouni says.
Also, the coherent working culture and people who bring their own initiative to the business have impressed Jouni.
“It seems that we have achieved a coherent working culture and that between the possible differences between different locations and countries there still seems to be only one Unikie. We all share a common agenda, what we want to promote, so there’s a lot of cooperation between different offices and countries.”
Jouni tells that he enjoys the sales-oriented approach that prevails at Unikie and the sales culture, where everyone participates to sales.
“With Unikie’s offering, we are actually able to provide solutions to our customers problems. It is nice to work with things that matter and are important”, he says.
