Meet our new team member – Mikko Lassila, Chief Commercial Officer

Spinnova has recently welcomed Mikko Lassila as its Chief Commercial Officer, leading the company’s commercial activities. With a background in sales and business development, and experience in the bioeconomy and advanced materials space, Mikko brings strong expertise in developing and scaling innovative material technologies. Below, Mikko shares more about his background, his motivation for joining Spinnova, and his outlook for the future:

“Personality tests have often described me as an assessor, developer, or deliverer, and I recognise myself in all three. I’m naturally curious and intuitive, which makes me comfortable operating on uncharted terrain. At the same time, I have a strong drive to make an impact. Perhaps that combination explains why I’ve repeatedly found myself working with something that is either new to the world, or at least new to me.

What matters most to me in my work is, first and foremost, who. Only after that comes the what. Finding common ground with the people I work with is the starting point; from there, we can figure out together what needs to be done. I’m very open about my personality and how I work, which tends to make collaboration straightforward. Honesty creates a shared baseline, and from that point, working efficiently becomes much easier.

That same balance is important to me outside of work as well. I enjoy spending time with my family and coaching young footballers, which offers a refreshing counterweight to professional life. Music has also always been part of who I am. From time to time I compose or play simply for the pleasure of it.

I began my career in material technologies more than two decades ago, initially within the textile industry, where I gained a strong understanding of complex global supply chains. In 2011, I shifted from soft to hard materials by moving into composites at Exel, a transition that proved transformative and expanded my perspective from functional expertise to strategic sales, marketing, and leadership. Over the years, I’ve developed and sold material solutions across industries worldwide, with experience ranging from carbon fibre composites and biocomposites to end applications from subsea to space.

In Finland, this kind of cross-material background is relatively rare. I’ve had the opportunity to learn about, work with, and commercialise many different material technologies, supported by more than a decade in leadership roles. In that sense, my professional path has placed me within the broader context of companies like Spinnova long before I formally joined: working at the intersection of materials, applications, and commercialisation.

Although my formal education is in business management, my career has shaped me to think like an engineer or a scientist, bridging technical possibilities with commercial reality. A key milestone in my professional development was completing the Aalto University MBA programme in 2020, with a focus on transformation and renewal. Graduating during the Covid‑19 pandemic further underscored the importance of adaptability and equipped me with a new lens for strategic thinking, leadership, and long‑term value creation.

Joining Spinnova marked another shift. While I’ve worked extensively with novel materials and technologies, Spinnova represents a different kind of starting point. The company is rooted in research and radical innovation, and nothing I had seen before could simply be copied and applied here. From a commercial perspective, the next phase is about scaling what has already been achieved and driving execution. This is precisely the work I will continue. In many ways, this feels like a natural continuation of everything that came before: combining deep material understanding, commercial thinking, leadership experience, and curiosity.

From what I’ve already seen, Spinnova is far along in the development of a completely new material, with a strong foundation in place across lab, pilot, and demo scale. In materials development, reaching commercial maturity typically takes 20 to 30 years. Given Spinnova’s level of readiness, the team’s strong capabilities, and the current momentum, this trajectory can be significantly accelerated as we move decisively towards the commercialisation of SPINNOVA® fibre and unlocking the full potential of the innovation.”

Mikko Lassila, Chief Commercial Officer at Spinnova