On a mission to build successful ventures to create a few unicorns, through a combination of approaches: Internal Ventures, External Ventures/Spin-outs, Fund of Fund, and CVC (NGP Capital).As partner and venture portfolio lead, on the internal ventures side, I drive venture assesment, investment decisions and accountable to take from early stage (proof-of-concept/technical validation) to scalable business & unicorn valuation. Supporting the teams with strategy, fund raising, growth, partnership, marketing and business development.Together with Nokia's CXO leadership & VCs - I drive investment decisions, pitch evaluations, new Investment opportunities, VC collaborations, external partnerships & early-stage investments. For external ventures & spin outs, I engage & partner with European players & operators: Venture Builders, VCs, Incubators, Accelerators - for venture building and investments.Collaborate closely with NGP Capital 400million € (latest Fund V) - announced in Jan 2022, and overall assets under management of 1.6 Billion € and 19 unicorns. Links:https://ventures.nokia.com/https://www.ngpcap.com/insights/ngp-capital-has-raised-a-new-venture-investment-fund-of-usd-400

Tarun Sharma joins Aalto University as Executive in Residence. Co-teach a course on corporate venturing & entrepreneurship.Support the Department & University in a number of initiatives: entrepreneurship education, research commercialization, bringing corporates closer to the startup world, as well as building bridges to his homeland India.

I am driving new business development, commercial & growth strategy for innovations coming from Bell Labs Solutions group. Working closely with C-suite and leadership team to launch new businesses, business models, go-to-market strategy, test product market fit and strategic partnerships.Able to leverage extensive experience of venture building, corporate incubation, venture capital and VC-backed startups and growing business from pre-revenue to 15 M€ annually.Additionally, I am also accountable for digital marketing & cross channels strategy at Bell Labs, driving millions of customer touch points and engagements yearly. Working closely with marketing leadership team, we have done successful digital marketing transformation of Bell Labs. Globally distributed team, I have end to end ownership of marketing products & platforms from customer insights, channel strategy, campaign planning, engagement and performance metrics.

Cloud Computing ? What is Cloud ? Why & Which Cloud ? What we do with it ? How we make money ? This is how my journey started here and with these questions .... Over the course of next 2 years, I took overall accountability & responsibility of defining the vision, strategy & eventually creating new business venture to drive emerging cloud business. Not just answering those & many other questions but building a business with more than 9 M€ million in customer pipeline.Worked very closely with CEO & senior leadership team at Tieto to drive the strategy & execution incl. heading strategic partnership & alliance decl with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Full P&L responsibility, incl. sales & marketing, product development and commercialisation of venture. In addition, I was also responsible for our new data science team and platform.

Fantastic learning curve for me personally & professionally to work with best minds in business, technology & software (examples of projects incl. HoloLens, Cortana and MSFT Surface). As part of senior biz dev leaders within emerging business unit, we got to explore, evaluate and do due diligence on various strategic opportunities.AlwaysOn listening, this project was to strategically evaluate potential, explore options and recommend new business opportunities & action plan in always on listening space. i.e. What if you could give command to a software bot which would listen to your instructions & task. Note: This was way before Google Home or Alexa was common and/or present in our homes.Image recognition & advance analytics, to answer queries such as show me all the pictures of me & my family at a beach (to remember holidays we had). Or that image where I was wearing blue polo neck. Looked into various interesting companies and strategic recommendation on overall space, opportunity and new business development activities. Adaptive & contextual user interface based on machine learning and AI. Predicting user behaviour and simplifying user interface with the likely expected interactions.Cloud based operating system, project to evaluate cloud powered operating system for handled devices. What if devices were dummy terminals and everything was powered by cloud?Digital Health, ecosystem to capture, monitor, asses health related data to accurately predict health patterns, and prevent (to the extent possible). Business assessment, key technology drivers, acquisition strategy and strategic partnerships.

CEO & Founder of boutique investment & real estate asset management company with multi-million assets under management. In addition, created marketplace for local rental solutions CouchNLounge (www.couchnlounge.com) catering 100+ customersCo-founded 2 companies @InfluenceQ and @ZumUp. Ambition of @InfluenceQ was to better utilise professional networks (connections, code base, repository, artefacts) to create marketplace for high tech community, effectively connecting supply with demand by utilising more automated solutions, AI & ML. @ZumUp was ahead of it's time in utilising voice as interface to interact with phone and playback topics of interest - this was pre Siri, Alexa & Cortana time.Board observer and strategic advisor to CEO of @MakeHelsinki (www.makehelsinki.com) - leading and fast growing digital products & solutions company in nordics focusing on healthcare. I advised management team on their growth strategy and M&A with eventual buyout by Healthcare International.Advisor to CEO & management team of Moods private ltd (leading hospitality brands in India: The Wine Company, Whisky Samba, Yo! China, The Wine Rack, The Kimono Club) ESB Board Member : To work alongside olympic level athletes & coaches is dream come true ! As an athlete myself, I have always been passionate about professional sports and sports development. As a member of the board for non-profit ESB (Espoo Badminton Club), I work with management team on developing professional athletes and club (www.esb.fi)Mentor at Aalto CEMS program – Leadership & Management program

Time to give back to our society, young entrepreneurs & dreamers by coaching in Aalto's Global Strategy & Global Leadership courses.As Aalto alumni myself, I want to contribute to my university and its students. I do this by giving various talks as guest speaker throughout academic year and across courses. Students find it immensely valuable and I too get to learn a lot from students. Topics I discuss & my specialities are : Strategy & Growth, New Ventures, Innovation, Technology Disruption, Digital TransformationAdditionally, every year, I drive business & innovation projects at Aalto university. Projects are business & innovation oriented covering customer, strategy, marketing & finance and technology. Typically projects last 4-5 months and comprised of global distributed high performing students/teams. Year 2021, project was nominated for global project of the year award across all business schools.CEMS is a global alliance of leading business schools, multinational companies and NGOs jointly delivering a pre-experience Master’s in Management programme that prepares future generations of responsible leaders.

Location based commerce in emerging markets was an interesting challenge both on product & business. As an example, how do you know approximate location of a user without GPS on a phone ? and if you don't know location, how do you build location based advertising business? These were some of the challenges & opportunities we were looking into..Utilising cell triangulation and/or GPS, launched location based mobile advertising platform for emerging markets, creating business pipeline of partners and targeted impressions. Drove key go to market activities, campaigns sales channels. Pilot with brands, ecosystem partners, ad-agencies, ad platform provider. Worked on enhanced Ad optimisation algorithms & drive SDK/API adoption. In addition, identified, evaluated and did 3 customer pilots for new business opportunities in local commerce & fleet management business utilising our mapping and location assets.

Corporate Business Development & Partnerships at Nokia was responsible for New Business Ventures, Strategic partnerships and Incubation. As part of the leadership team, I had privilege to work on exciting new & disruptive ideas, ventures and strategic projects within the company:New Ventures & Incubator:Nokia Money: This was way before Apple Pay, Google Pay or other mobile payments solutions were in the market at any reasonable scale. We developed (through JV), partnered, successfully launched mobile payments business in India with millions of customers.Nokia Offers & Mobile Commerce: We had number of initiatives to drive mobile based commerce solutions. Joint Venture for mobile commerce, coupons & payments and also logistic based solution (TEJ) cloud based and mobile first.e-Reader: We saw clear need, market trend and business opportunity towards digital reading (reading from the screen as opposed to physical paper). We wanted to create digital content ecosystem (incl. hardware optimised for reading use cases).Wrist health sensors: Clearly massive opportunity in digital health, wellness & wearable technology space. We worked on concept, prototype and end to end wearable tech solution which is wrist based (like Apple Watch). Ultimately it was divested and became seperate co. PulseOn.Home media streaming & content aggregator: Low powered, low bandwidth based home media streaming solution for emerging markets. Think of it as Apple TV or Amazon kindle in 2G. We concepted, developed and launched the product in Brazil & India.Orignal1 JV to address anti-counterfeit opportunity which was based on RFID tags. JV/Partnership between Nokia, SAP and Giesecke & Devrient.

Overall commercial & technology strategy for software & solutions for Nokia enterprise devices. Devices back then used to be quite dump and didn't have much capabilities. So in order to have capabilities such as mobile office (word, excel, ppt), unified communications, chat messaging, voip and security capabilities - we had to work through extensive product management process. I had end to end ownership and responsibility for that incl. new concept development, innovation solutions etc. Driving product marketing campaigns & partnerships to drive sales & marketing.

These were early days of internet, e-commerce, mobile services and apps. And very few high frequency transaction systems in the world (outside of banking and mainframes) were present or live. I was integral part of platform & product development team, and played critical role in development of Nokia's global online commerce platform. Took various roles, responsibilities (consultant, architect & project manager) over the course of 4 years. Successfully leading a team of 20+ employees to architecting business processes & digital solutions across business functions (Marketing, Sales Planning, Inventory Management, Production planning, Finance & Forecasting)During my time at IBM Finland, I also worked across customers in pre-sales, sales, consulting, delivery and transformation. Customers included Banks, Fintech, Payments (Visa, Mastercard), Airline (Finnair), e-commerce (Anttila)From 1998-2000, working as software engineer in Drish Infotech solutions developing their supply chain solution.