Idea Morph: Democratizing innovation for small businesses
Romania Innovation Fund Winner
Why this program?
Why this program?
- Despite some improvements, small businesses in Central and Eastern Europe continue to face significant financing challenges, with structural issues limiting access to both debt and equity financing.
- 6.8 million small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) operate in Central and Eastern Europe, the majority of which are underserved by traditional financial institutions.
- In 2024, the percentage of SMEs reporting loan rejections remained high, indicating ongoing difficulties in accessing traditional bank financing.
- Embedded finance solutions can increase SME financial inclusion by up to 20%, according to industry benchmarks.
- AI opens up new opportunities for small businesses in Europe by supporting them to learn from their own data, cut costs, boost efficiency, save time, and innovate. However, only about 7% of European small businesses adopt AI.
Program overview
Micro and small businesses are the main drivers of the EU economy — yet many of them lack access to the digital tools, strategic support, and expert knowledge compared to larger enterprises. Whether it’s hiring a consultant, running a product ideation sprint, or launching a customer co-creation process, the costs are often just too high. That’s where the Idea Morph Community comes in.
Idea Morph Community is a co-creation platform. With support from Mastercard Strive, it supports small businesses to grow by giving them free access to digital tools, bespoke expert support, and AI-powered insights. It democratizes innovation, making structured problem-solving and design thinking processes usually reserved for big corporations available to all, for free.
Through the platform, small businesses gain access to proven innovation frameworks, inspiration, and a collaborative process that brings in both customers and experts to co-create better products, services, and strategies.
Once a business joins the platform, it begins with a short assessment to determine where they are in their digital journey and what kind of innovation process they need. Based on that, the platform generates a personalized roadmap made up of small, focused co-creation projects — enabling them to understand their customers, generate fresh ideas, and validate top concepts before investing time and money.
Along the way, a matchmaking mechanism recommends the best collaborators (experts in the relevant subject area) for each project. Business owners can also invite their own customers and team members to participate in the process, making expert and customer co-creation easy and inclusive.
The platform offers a bespoke, personalized digital transformation journey with a step-by-step guided design thinking framework that makes the process simple, fast, and structured for small businesses.
With Idea Morph Community, small businesses no longer have to guess what will work. They can test, iterate, and grow by harnessing digital and data-first tools and expert support.
About Idea Morph
Idea Morph is a co-creation platform that helps small businesses create better products and services by involving customers and experts in the product design and problem solving processes.
““I believe entrepreneurs are the ones who defy the status quo, daring to dream big, take risks and push through a relentless, often lonely journey. It’s a path full of tough compromises, scarce resources, very few companions and many unknown things to do. With Idea Morph, we aim to make that journey a little less daunting and contribute to helping them succeed in building the next wave of unicorns, while solving meaningful, high-stakes problems.” ”
Catalina Banuleasa
CEO of Idea Morph
Implementation partners
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