Straventis — Turning vision into execution

STRAVENTIS helps organizations grow - from where they are to where they want to go.

We work with leadership, product, and innovation teams to bring strategic clarity, market insight, and venture discipline to turn strategic ambition into focused portfolios, validated and scaled opportunities, and commercial results.

We support businesses at any stage, navigating major strategic transitions, expanding into new markets, segments, or geographies, or building the capability to pursue the next phase of growth.

Discover Our Approach

View Selected Engagements

About

Andreas Renken

Founder, STRAVENTIS

Andreas Renken founded STRAVENTIS on 25 years at three of the world's leading industrial materials companies - DuPont, Eastman, and Bekaert - diagnosing and aligning organizational readiness, defining growth strategies, building and governing innovation portfolios, and identifying and exploring new markets and ventures in commoditizing businesses where growth had to be created, and then captured.

At Bekaert, Andreas diagnosed a structural misalignment between the tire steel cord division's innovation ambition and its organizational readiness, and defined a 10-year growth and innovation strategy. He received the full endorsement of the Group CEO and Chairman of the Board, who entrusted him with its execution.

He identified the need for improved product portfolio management and created the regional product management functions, to simplify legacy complexity.

Over three years, he built a market exploration team and transformed the division from a technology-push model to a market-driven growth engine, building and governing a €500M+ innovation portfolio across core and adjacent segments, grounded in deep customer and market insight. He also identified and validated new disruptive platforms to prepare the mature and commoditizing business for its next growth phase, away from an increasingly competitive environment.

His work at Bekaert was recognised with two awards: the 2024 Bekaert Sustainability Innovation Award and the prestigious Tire Technology Material Innovation of the Year award in 2025.

At Eastman, Andreas led product and application strategy for the EMEA rubber additives business, building direct relationships with customer technical leaders and executives, uncovering unmet needs, and translating market and customer insight into concrete growth projects. He led market exploration activities, closed seven growth opportunities generating over $4.5M in annual recurring revenue, initiated five additional innovation projects, and maintained full commercial momentum through the COVID period by developing remote collaboration tools to keep customer engagements at full speed.

At DuPont, where Andreas spent nearly two decades, he progressed from R&D and application development to global segment leadership, taking full ownership of where the Kevlar® tire and industrial business should grow, how to pursue it, and what the organization needed to get there.

Earlier, he served as an internal business management consultant, diagnosing and optimizing product management, pricing strategy, customer segmentation, and supply chain processes, experience that directly shaped his approach to organizational readiness and execution alignment.

As Global Segment Leader, he defined and governed a global innovation and product portfolio across Europe, the Americas, and Asia, aligned distributed technical and commercial teams around shared priorities, established open innovation partnerships and joint development agreements, and introduced market-driven ways of working and new methodologies to sharpen early-stage opportunity identification and accelerate commercial impact.

The results were tangible: 12% annual segment growth, a DuPont Engineering Excellence Award for a program generating $54M in projected new revenue through new product introduction and customer adoption, eleven patents including the foundational patent for DuPont's Vizilon® thermoplastic composites platform, and election as Chair of the CenTire industry-university research consortium.

Andreas holds a PhD in Polymers and Biomaterials from EPFL Lausanne and a Master's in Chemical Engineering from ETH Zurich. He is fluent in English, French, and German.

Where we can help

Readiness Assessment & Organizational Alignment

Assessing and aligning organization, portfolio, and technical readiness level to enable successful deployment and scalable growth.

Growth & Innovation Strategy

Building governed growth portfolios with clear priorities, investment logic, and execution focus.

Market Insight & Opportunity Definition

Translating market and customer insight into clear opportunity spaces, portfolio direction, and development priorities.

New Market & Segment Exploration

Identifying and assessing new market, segment, or geographic opportunities, and defining where and how to start, from initial exploration through to entry strategy.

Venture Exploration & Assessment

Evaluating and de-risking new business opportunities, from new platforms and business segments to M&A assessment and venture-backed growth, through structured validation and staged investment.

Selected advisory and leadership engagements

A selection of recent engagements, described as we actually work: starting with the situation, not the solution.

Restoring differentiation in a commoditizing tire cord reinforcement business

Refocusing innovation and development to restore differentiation and enable new value propositions in a commoditizing reinforcement business

Situation:
Core reinforcement products were facing increasing price pressure and declining differentiation, while development activities were largely focused on incremental product improvements. Several ongoing projects lacked clear linkage to unmet market needs and did not sufficiently strengthen competitive positioning or customer value.
Intervention:
Reviewed and redefined development programs based on identified unmet market needs and emerging customer priorities. Reframed value propositions and redirected projects from pure product development toward differentiated solution offerings. This included, for example, incorporating material traceability and certification approaches to address emerging sustainability-driven customer requirements, and identifying adjacent opportunities beyond core offerings through systematic and structured market exploration.
Outcome:
Enabled leadership to reposition development efforts toward clearly differentiated offerings, strengthen customer value propositions, and establish a credible pathway to restore differentiation and support future growth beyond price competition.

Transforming a fragmented global pipeline into a market-driven growth roadmap

Structuring and prioritizing a fragmented global development pipeline into a market-driven product roadmap

Situation:
Product and application development activities were largely opportunistic and regionally driven. Multiple initiatives were running in parallel without a consolidated global view of priorities, market attractiveness, or strategic fit. This limited leverage across regions, reduced focus of regional and central teams, and diluted impact.
Intervention:
Structured development activities into a unified growth portfolio and coordinated, market-driven pipeline. Defined clear target segments, regrouped and prioritized projects based on market potential and value creation, introduced explicit go/no-go decision criteria, and created a transparent roadmap aligning technical development with global commercial strategy.
Outcome:
Created strategic focus and alignment across regions, clarified development priorities, and enabled disciplined portfolio steering and faster, more coordinated product introductions in priority segments, contributing to a projected 12% revenue growth in a market growing at approximately 3% CAGR.

Restoring pipeline continuity and decision discipline in a €500M+ innovation portfolio

Building and governing a €500M+ innovation portfolio to restore pipeline continuity and establish portfolio decision discipline

Situation:
A substantial innovation portfolio was in place, with late-stage development projects generally well managed. However, the pipeline was structurally unbalanced: intermediate-stage programs were underrepresented, and early-stage opportunity development was limited and not governed by clear progression criteria. As a result, advanced projects were often kept active longer than warranted, as there were insufficient mid-term successors to replace them, making prioritization and termination decisions difficult and weakening pipeline continuity.
Intervention:
Restructured the portfolio to establish a coherent pipeline across early, intermediate, and late-stage programs. Introduced a stage-gate process with clear progression criteria and evidence-based decision requirements, and implemented governance enabling leadership to review, prioritize, advance, or stop programs across the entire portfolio. Accelerated selected projects to address mid-term gaps, discontinued others that no longer met strategic and value criteria, and strengthened early-stage opportunity generation.
Outcome:
Restored pipeline continuity and established disciplined, evidence-based investment steering across a €500M+ portfolio, enabling leadership to make timely continuation, acceleration, and termination decisions, focus resources on the most valuable opportunities, and build a sustainable foundation for future growth.

Restoring execution momentum in a deep-tech scale-up

Restoring execution momentum and enabling deployment in a deep-tech scale-up

Situation:
The technology start-up was stalled in the deployment phase, unable to move toward customer adoption and initial sales. Responsibilities within the team were unclear, decisions were repeatedly revisited, the work environment and motivation were deteriorating, and field activities were not translating into tangible deployment progress.
Intervention:
Assessed the technical readiness level and diagnosed misalignment between technology maturity and organizational structure. Recommended targeted organizational adjustments and defined a structured field evaluation and market introduction pathway aligned with technology readiness.
Outcome:
Enabled leadership to restore execution clarity, realign the organization with technology readiness, and establish a credible pathway toward industrial deployment, predictable market introduction, and scalable growth.

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