Author Archives: Marilenaalbero

In this post i would like to talk about my Bachelor Degree Project in Politecnico of Milan since it was similar to the simulation we made in this course and then, it gave me the possibility to feel prepared before this course started. I would like in this way to make a comparison between the two, underlying what are the lessons i learned from both of them.

In Milan the platform was different and the simulation was called “Business Game”. This game lasted four months ( from March to June ) and i had to write two reports as a final degree thesis plus a presentation of our strategy in July. Differently from the simulation of this course, we had been divided in groups of three people and there weren’t constraints about gender, culture, nationality and so on. Therefore, my group was composed from three Italian students. In my opinion, this limited a lot our knowledge and open-mindedness. Indeed, is proved that diverse teams are smarter because they are characterized by different ways of thinking and behaving that allow them to make better decision. Probably our results would be even better but anyway, we worked really hard to reach good results.

Another difference was that in the “Business Game” we had to sell different kind of furnitures to wholesalers and retailers and there was the possibility to choose which of the two markets to enter. There were five competitors and then, the objective was exactly the same: make the company grow and win the competition.

Some aspects of the “Business game” were more challenging than the simulation. As examples, we had to forecast the demand for the next period both with qualitative and quantitative methods and calculate all the costs and the accounting metrics, with the help of programs like Microsoft Excel, in order to figure out if our business was sustainable.

On the other hand, even if we didn’t have to calculate and much information were already available because the time was limited, the “Marketplace Secondlife” simulation included more features. These like the possibility to design advertisements and define the salary of the employees. Furthermore, the “Marketplace Secondlife” platform was, generally, better designed.

To sum up, i learnt a lot from both these experiences because they gave me the possibility to face the business world and to understand how is difficult to manage a company in an intensive competitive market. Moreover, I decided to write about my experience back in Italy in order to encourage both business and engineering students to pick the possibility to run this simulations more than one times. This because, even if i had experience, each platform and market ecosystem is different and, in the complex and uncertain business world, you can never learn enough but is true that the more experience you have, the more you can achieve the success.

I hope you will enjoy this post and feel free to write me if you want to know more about the “Business Game”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the 22th of April i went to the Start up day in Stockholm. This event has been organized by the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship and it usually hosts students and startups from Sweden, the Nordics and Europe. I had already decided to go before it was presented in class but, then, the presentation made me even more excited.

Basically, this event was composed by speakings all day long about different ideas and successful start-ups. Moreover, during the afternoon there was the possibility to partecipate at workshops and to pitch our ideas.

On details, it started at 11 am with an introduction that explained the importance of this day. Indeed, thanks to its success, this is the 12th year that this event takes place in Stockholm. So, the first questions rose spontaneous: “Why Start up day?” “Why is it so successful?” . The answer is simple: in this day there is the possibility to collect diversity (people from different universities and countries) and learn just by telling and listening to stories.

Since i don’t want to be repetitive and i know that a lot of people were there, i would like to emphasize only what were for me the most useful and interesting parts of this event. In total, i attended three speakings in the morning and two in the afternoon.

Regarding saturday morning, the first speaking, held by Sidney Lai, was about virtual reality, the second one was held by Sofia Appelgren, the founder of Mitt Liv and in the last one Elina Berglund Scherwitz talked about contraceptives and her new app called Natural Cycles. According to me, among these three stories, the second talk was the best one.

Mitt Liv – “My life”

The idea of Sofia to found Mitt Liv in the 2008 was born from an observation of the world we are leaving in. In particular, the topic of this talking was diversity. Indeed, even if we try to deny it, everyone knows that discrimination rules our world and each decision we make is led by prejudice that is related to a lack of education.

Mitt Liv aim, therefore, is to value and not discredit diversity being a bridge between companies and people who are looking for a job as well as provide education in Sweden in order to make people conscious of the world and of the mechanism that govern their behavior.

In particular, two parts of this talk came to my attention. The first one was about a google survey which revealed that 99,9997% of the decisions we make are unconscious and that, when we are meeting new people, only in the first second we already make eleven unconscious decisions. The second one, instead, was a reference to a very popular Steve Jobs quote in which he explained that, to be successful, we don’t need to be smarter, we just need to believe in what we do. Indeed, everything is related to our view of the world.

To summarize what sofia was trying to explain, i could say that nothing for her is simple, especially running a business, but when we know our mechanisms and we take responsibilities on our world everything become simpler.

 

During the afternoon, i moved from the main stage, when these three talks were set, to another place called “the Cave”. It was a very beautiful place whose name come from its appearance since it seems to be in a real cave. There i listened to two stories: the first was told by Jesper Ericsson, the director of sales and marketing at Biolamina, while the second one was held by Sofia Svanteson, founder of Ocean Observation. Even if these speaking were both interesting, the first one touched a very important topic: the stem cells.

Biolamina 

This speaking immediately attracted my attention since it was built on a real story. Indeed, Jesper Ericsson’s father was diagnosed the Parkinsons disease two year ago and the only way to cure this terrible illness is to replace the ill cells. In this way, Jesper explained us why is now working at Biolamina. This company, indeed, make researches about the stem cells.

 

Stem cells are the evolution and today are necessary not only for Parkinsons disease but also for many other illnesses that are affecting our society. In particular, Biolamina works to improve the tools used to grow these cells since at the current State-of-Art they are still too bad. The main idea of this company is to build laminins to make the cells feel as at home and make them more homogeneous. However, since to create these cells is necessary aborted fetus, is necessary to find new solutions to take them from everyone. This is what Biolamina is working on.

As a conclusion, Jesper talked more about himself and the importance of sales and marketing also for this field. Indeed, is absolutely necessary to sale the right product (in this case the right cell and medications) to the right patient.

This post only gives a restricted view of this day, but emphasizes its importance for entrepreneurs and university students. I would like to thank this course and Stockholm to give me the possibility to attend such an event and i hope you will find it interesting.

 

 

During the Easter Holiday some of my friends came to visit me in Stockholm and, talking about this course i am attending in KTH, it came to my attention that two of them created a start-up two months ago. Its name is NECSTonatNECST.

First of all, i have to say that this start-up was born as a university project. Indeed, Luca and Claudio are attending their third year of the bachelor in computer engineering at Politecnico of Milan and they are working with NECST lab (Novel, Emerging Computing System Technologies Laboratory). For clarity, this lab comprises a spread number of researches on advanced topics in computing systems ranging from architectural characteristics, to hardware-software co-design methodologies, to security and dependability issues of complex system architectures. This is where their project starts from.

 

 

Now that you know the context the two guys are working in, let’s talk about their idea.

In this project computers are used for the financial purposes. In fact, with it Luca and Claudio try to solve the pricing problem of financial options. Specifically, options are contracts that grant the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell an underlying asset at a set price on or before a certain date and nowadays are one of the most used financial derivates. The idea was born since, even if options are so common, the pricing process is not that simple because it requires an accurate and quick pricing tool to be successful and so the “perfect” model doesn’t exist yet.

Getting into details of the project, in order to describe options value oscillations as a function of time, in the most appropriate mathematical way, is necessary to use stochastic volatility models. At the current State-of-Art, the Heston model is the best one to describe the market behavior. It is a stochastic volatility model which assumes that the volatility of the asset is not constant, nor even deterministic, but follows a random process and, since it is really complex, it needs Monte Carlo simulations to be implemented. Monte Carlo methods are a broad class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. These simulations are generally implemented on a FPGA ( field-programmable gate array ) that, thanks to is parallel nature, can be used to reduce the time consumption to run these simulations. Therefore, the idea consists in developing a framework based on a central CPU which coordinates a cluster of FPGAs in order to combine the flexibility of the CPU and the efficiency of FPGAs. In this way, the CPU computes the Monte Carlo algorithm while FPGAs price different options and manage the computational load and, thus, it is possible to overcome the high running time and the low energy efficiency level of the current State of the Art.

I am glad they talked with me about their idea because i found it interesting and a useful innovation. I really hope that they will have success in the future.

I believe this project will be for you as interesting as it has been for me.

 

If you want to know more about the project, follow Luca and Claudio on the socials:

https://www.facebook.com/NECSTonatNECST/?fref=ts

https://twitter.com/NECSTonatNECST

And if you want to know more about NECST lab: http://necst.it/about

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday I attended the STHLM TECH MEETUP in Hilton Auditorium, Stockholm. The STHLM TECH MEETUP is the Europe’s largest monthly event for start-ups and takes place the first Monday of each month. This time two big guests were centre-stage: IBM Ventures and Schibsted. IBM Venture Capital Group is dedicated to driving IBM’s commitment to innovation in the venture capital community. The Group helps start-ups rise above the rest by increasing their visibility, differentiation and credibility. On the other hand, Schibsted is one of the world’s leading digital media companies with 6,900 employees in 30 different countries including Sweden where this company has partnership with big companies as Blocket. Today, millions of people interact with Schibsted companies every day.

These two companies showed how big companies are investing a lot in start-ups, especially in Stockholm and the Nordics. On details, the business environment of Stockholm is broad and the investment landscape is changing and growing day-by-day. In 2016, for example, the initial investments were about 1.4 billions while the exit investments around 1.75 billions.

The meeting started with interviews to some Swedish companies operating in Stockholm in order to highlight this changing in the Stockholm investment landscape. Mentioned companies were Swedbank, Dynamo and DriveNow.

Swedbank’s operations are aimed to help the people and businesses achieve a solid financial sustainability. This company made lots of different start-ups partnerships to build customer value. They are able to give their customer more control and they try to achieve optimal solutions. This bank is very progressive even more than American banks.

Dynamo is a company focused on mobile since this is what they do best. Their main activities are consulting, creating new own ideas trough a concept studio and acting as a technical co-founder or a development team for start-ups. Indeed, with their code-for-equity program they lower the threshold for great start-ups. The design of Dynamo is based on Design Sprints – a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. Design sprint is used in order not to waste time, as a great ice breaker for new teams and is a good habit and process. Moreover, people after these 5 days are tired but very happy. This process is composed by 5 phases:

• Understand: This phase must be clear and reach common understanding of the working context including the problem, the business, the customer, the value proposition, and how success will be determined
• Diverge: Generate insights and potential solutions to our customer’s problems. It is necessary to make assumptions to create our idea and no judgement is allowed. Individual and time exercise is necessary.
• Converge: in this phase judgement is allowed and we try to find a common solution.
• Prototype: creation of a prototype and is prepared for the test with existing or potential customers.
• Test & Learn: before penetrating the market, testing the product is necessary by making the right questions to the customers.

The last one was DriveNow, car sharing company. DriveNow owns 300 vehicles in Stockholm at the moment and it provides a more flexible way to have access to a car. Their purpose, indeed, is to guarantee flexibility and quick solutions to their customers. Principal competitors are the owners of private cars and their mental perception that stop them from using shared cars since they don’t really own them. The company goal is now to move in the direction of a green and sharing economy.

The central part of the meeting was composed by interviews to Christoph Auer Welsbach, investor of IBM Ventures, one founder and two investment managers. There was a long discussion and Christoph stated how IBM is searching strong start-ups that holds for the next hundreds years and more and more large companies today are seeking cooperation with startups.

In the conclusion, the meeting ended with three pitches of some of the newest Stockholm’s start-ups as Einride and CIRQS.

It was a great to partecipate to this start up event since it helped me to get in contact with the entrepreneurial world. I figured out how in Sweden there is a high quality start-up business full of start-ups with great visions and ideas as well as a deeper and innovative technology environment.

The event: https://www.meetup.com/it-IT/STHLM-Tech-Meetup/events/238554307/

Read more about IBM; IBM Watson new creation: http://www.adweek.com/digital/ibm-watson-created-a-modern-sculpture-inspired-by-the-work-of-one-spains-most-famous-architects/