Author Archives: Sarae

A very short summary and reflection on my learnings from this course.

What I am taking away from this course is a changed and evolved understanding of both open and user innovation. It has challenged my view of innovation that stems from users and open data. As an HCI-student, I was already quite familiar with user innovation before the start of this course. I thought I had so much knowledge on the topic already. But in this course I have learnt about user innovation from another perspective – mainly the business side of things, as a strategy to further innovation processes. I now know that there are many ways to access and manage external innovation depending on your purpose. While this new understanding is vital for me as an innovator, it will also be of essence for me as a designer.

I believe open innovation is only in its infancy. It will become even more important, maybe especially for authorities but also for companies to able to compete. Especially in combination with, or to facilitate user innovation. Both the knowledge and technology required to innovate will only become more accessible to more people.

SUP46 and 19@19 networks December Event – Holiday Party

19@19 netWORKs host networking events with the vision to empower people communication, accelerate their entrepreneurial journey but also prepare people for everyday human interactions. This event, the Holiday Party, was co-organised with SUP46 and Stockholm Entrepreneurs and held at December 19.

Faviana Vangelius was the guest at the meet-up. She is a true innovator and entrepreneur and could be described as a pioneer within the field of VR. At only 29 years old, she is the founder and CEO of one of Sweden’s few virtual reality game studios, the newly founded SVRVIVE Studios. About 6 months ago, Faviana got hooked on VR and realised that she wants to work with it somehow. The problem was that, at the time, there weren’t any jobs to apply for or educations to apply to within the field. She saw a need in the market for VR content, and decided to start SVRVIVE Studios. Already today, the company has 13 employees.

Faviana talked about the wide range of possibilities and application areas of VR, from military and medicine to education and gaming. SVRVIVE works with the latter: gaming. They make VR games for premium VR and platforms such as HTC Vive, Oculus and Playstation. Their first game was just released, created and put out in the market in just 6 months. One of the great challenges for SVRVIVE, who strive to be among the first in the market, is to release games to the consumer at a high quality but produced in a high pace. In order to achieve this, they released a free to download demo to test the market, and allow the market to test the game. With this strategy, the company received a lot of valuable feedback directly from their customers.

SVRVIVE as a company operates in an emerging, but still infant market. Many actors are involved in pushing this market, especially the great hardware giants Facebook with Oculus, Playstation with their VR-set and HTC with Vive. This has been the year of the early adopters. Faviana expects the early majority to follow as soon as next year, even though we all know there is often quite a gap between the early adopters and early majority that can be a though period for new and small business to survive. She claims this because of the many actors involved in pushing VR to the public, but also as she expects the cost of the hardware to begin to drop to a more consumer friendly price along with a greater availability of content.

About 10 years ago, a friend told me that in the future, we will be able to print things. Not things on paper, but actual things, like a cup from which you can drink your coffee. She told me that we would be able to do this in our homes too. If we need a plate or a fork, or a cup for our coffee – we’ll just print it! I didn’t believe her. I couldn’t.

10 years later, last week, I attended a 3D printing and modeling workshop and printed a (tiny) boat.

Women@EIT is an initiative by two of my fellow EIT Digital students (Dora Pálfi and Maria Kanov) with the goal to build a community and network of female innovators, creators student and others in ICT. Even though it is called women in EIT, it is open to any women (or men) who would like to become part of the network. The community works to connect women for the exchange of knowledge and experience as well as inspire and empower each other. This is something that I personally appreciate and that I think is needed, as a woman in this field were we still are a minority. Apart from that, they also provide women with the chance to learn real technological skills. In order to do this, they organise workshops with different themes that also features elements of networking and the chance to socialise. The first event they organised was an Arduino workshop. The event I attended last week was a 3D printing workshop. It was held at the VIC Studio at KTH Campus. The workshop began with an introductory lecture about 3D printing and modeling. We then used Blender https://www.blender.org/ for modeling our 3D prints. As many of you might already know, Blender is a 3D creation suite that supports pretty much anything you might need that has to do with 3D: modelling, simulation, rendering, motion tracking, video editing. And the list goes on. To you who don’t know it, I would definitely recommend Blender because as a novice user it is actually very easy to use, it is free and it is open source! Anyway, we got to create 3D models of a boat. Mine ended up as a catamaran unintentionally. Still a boat though.

What is so exciting about 3D printing is that it has the potential to really change the way innovation and production takes place. Especially as the 3D printers are becoming more and more consumer friendly in terms of price and size. An open innovation community is already being established and growing, where 3D models ready to print are being shared.

Join Women@EIT facebook group to be part of this community and get information about future events https://www.facebook.com/groups/EITwomen/