“I enjoy the fact that more and more licensees are using Tove's original artwork, because I think her drawings are unique and wonderful. Businesses are lining up to collaborate with us,” Sophia Jansson, Chairperson of the Moomin Characters board, said.

“In the beginning, Tove decided what was a viable Moomin product, then my dad Lars. Now it is me, Roleff, and my sons. I think our values and guidelines have not really changed. Moomin products are an extension of what the Moomins represent, the passion and the philosophy.”

Passion, and all the passionate connections and relations people have with Moomin, lead to an urgent need to coordinate and organize activities across time and space. Coordinating and organizing at the crossroads of passions is an integral part of the Moomin business and it has given rise to what we refer to as the Moomin ecosystem.

The sense of passion brings a specific flavour to coordinating the ecosystem. While coordination is commonly understood as the setting up of governance mechanisms and interventions to align interests and activities, at Moomin it seems to be more emergent. Coordination is more about finding common causes and interests than about setting up elaborate systems and monitoring them.

The Moomin ecosystem engages in numerous strategic partnerships that keep the brand alive. Working with companies that share Tove Jansson's vision of life is central to this. Relations with the more than 700 licensees that Moomin has vary in depth and scope. Working with non- profit organizations and engaging in charities and fundraising is a fundamentally important element of the Moomin ecosystem. Moomin stakeholders are a wide and varied group.

Strategic partnerships refer here to Moomin's formalized (through licensing contracts, for example) relationships with other companies. Strategy scholar Robert M. Grant maintained that strategic partnerships help to tap into and utilize strengths of other companies to make both companies stronger in the long run.

This is evident in how Moomin operates. Stakeholder is a wider concept for us, depicting all kinds of people and organizations that feature in Moomin's strategic partnerships. It denotes the fluffy boundaries of business operations. What or who is a stakeholder needs to be determined case by case.