Monthly Archives: November 2015

Last 26th of November, six of us decided to go to an event about Integration and Entrepreneurship and we thought it would be interesting sharing our experience with you. The event was organized by Stockholm+Acumen together with Impact HUB Stockholm, and it’s main goal was to bring together social entrepreneurs, social innovators and supporters to discuss problems and solutions in the area of integration and entrepreneurship. Acumen raises charitable donations to invest in companies, leaders, and ideas that are changing the way the world tackles poverty. Stockholm+Acumen is a Stockholm-based volunteer-led chapter, part of a global community of changemakers, which shares the vision and supports the goals of Acumen – “to create a world beyond poverty by investing patient capital in social enterprises, emerging leaders, and breakthrough ideas.”

“Nowadays everyone is worrying about multicultural issues, however this four people that are going to present here today are actually doing something.”

During the night we could enjoy four different speakers explaining their projects or companies, of course, all related to the main topic of entrepreneurship around the main point of integration. We are going to explain briefly each of these initiatives so you can make an idea and search more about them if you find them interesting.

The first speech was about The Good Talents. In their own words, “The Good Talents is a program that tries to find young talents whose capacity and resources haven’t been made visible yet”. Through many workshops, they identify and improve the leadership and social entrepreneurship skills of the participants. The Good Talents participants develop their own business ideas that solve local challenges and these ideas are presented in a final event. This program is a great help especially for those young talents coming from families with lower income and thus a tougher background to success.

The second speaker was Lina, from Syria. She talked about Invitationsdepartementet, which is an organization that wants to make a change in people and society by connecting natives and immigrants at dinner tables. The meal is a dinner, free of charge, and in someone’s home. It is a great idea and it gives a chance to these incoming people to meet locals and practice the language. It started in January last year and it is already available in 25 cities in Sweden and around 25 cities around Europe (excluding Sweden).

Then there was the turn for Ingrid Ramberg who is part of Mångkulturella Almanackan which is an association of intercultural activities and research. The project she was presenting was the Multicultural Calendar. In this Calendar you can find marked more than 700 important events of different cultures such as the Chinese New Year, Christmas day or the jewish Rosh Hashaná. The aim of the calendar was described by Ingrid with three words: Bonding, Statement and Tool. Since it is a tool used to integrate all cultures together by the understanding of which dates are important for each culture, thus making a statement of fomenting bonding through different communities.

The last speaker of the evening was Carlos Salas, from Sveriges Internationella Talanger (SIT). It is a professional network established in April 2014 which currently have around 1200 members, all of them with bachelor degrees, master degrees or PhDs. They discovered that 8 out of 10 jobs are given through contacts, so as an immigrant without contacts is hard to get a job. The main goal of the organization is to build a bridge between their educated, motivated and talented members and companies that want to become innovative, globalized and culturally diverse.

Overall, it was a really positive experience. We had the chance to get to know many new ideas and projects about Social Entrepreneurship, that we never thought about. The testimonies we listened to were full of enthusiasm and hope: those people really believed on what they were working on. Entrepreneurship events are so inspirational and they always make us realize how much we can do with what we have been learning. Hopefully, in one the next event, the ones speaking about social impact innovative ideas will be one of us, from the Open & User Innovation course. We are looking forward to it.

 

This post was prepared by Carlos García, Blanca Martínez, Itziar Ocon, Sergio Sanz, Giovanna Vilaza and Pablo Villa; as we all went to the event and though it would be better to write just one common post rather than six different ones telling about the same experience.

Reading books and articles is one thing, learning directly from the best entrepreneurs and engineers of our time is another. Co-founder of Prezi, Peter Arvai knows how presenting in an impactful manner. He proved it yesterday at the alumni ceremony on KTH campus. It was a pleasure to listen to his words; I felt inspired, open-minded and somehow lighter afterwards.

Peter started the presentation by saying that “it was certainly the most sentimental prize he has ever received”. With a small audience and his mother in the room, we could barley think that we actually had in front of us the CEO of a 60 million users company. He went through his childhood and how he was enjoying physics as much as dancing when he was a kid. He knew that at some point he would have to choose between the two. Since his dancing skills weren’t too promising, he decided to go for the scientific studies. But something was missing… That is when he heard about a brand-new program offered at KTH in Sweden, called Digital Technology. A degree that would gather computer science, signal theory, cognitive science and HCI. What a great opportunity to combine his passion for science with a human and social approach! At that point, I was smiling, being able to relate to his experience, and feeling happy and honored of being part of the new generation of Digital Technologist at KTH.

Peter Arvei focuses on creativity; we don’t need to be born as a genius or an artist to be creative. What makes the difference is the mindset:

• Are you intrinsically motivated?
• Are you able to make yourself vulnerable?
• Are you able to challenge your assumption?

We should ask ourself these questions. The motivation is the driving force. But it is not sufficient to succeed. We have to accept the failure … and be able to bounce back ! Peter Arvai said, not without humour, that “few years of therapy helped him to accept to be vulnerable”. And that “a solid support from friend and family was essential”.

His main point was that creativity is open to everyone. And that we shouldn’t think too much about the future. We should act now and do things now, because we’ll never know where we’ll be in one year. There is this very sentence that still resonates in my head:

“We spend too much time thinking about what will be in our resumé rather than what will will be on our tombstone.”

It gives a good taste of yesterday’s presentation. A bunch of advices, with a great sense of modesty and humanity. When Peter told us the story of his startup, we learned that he met the head of design and CTO of Prezi between the KTH walls. So, look at your classmates, talk to your neighbors: he or she may be your future partner in crime for your new venture.

Céline

I have seen quite often when someone talks about Linux/Free Software he/she usually gives all credit to Linus Torvalds. Many people think that Linus started the free software campaign. However the truth is Linus only wrote one piece of the free software, the operating system kernel. The person who deserves most of the credit is Richard Stallman, he is the person who started the campaign of free software. Richard Stallman started the movement of free software way ahead of Linus, the movement focused on freedom to study the software, change it as user likes, and redistribute the software. Richard Stallman is the “lead user” in the movement of free software, he started writing and asking other people to write the free operating system. By the time Linus started writing the Linux Kernel, Richard Stallman had developed all important pieces of the puzzle except one, the Kernel, which Linus wrote and freed in 1992. Later the free kernel Linus wrote combined with GNU software system came emerged as an operating system as we know it today Linux (Richard Stallman says it is GNU/Linux not Linux, and I totally agree).

The Linux as we know it today

For more details please watch

OR read

https://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu.html

 

Another concept that we often confuse is that free software means without price, however free software really refers to freedom just like “freedom of speech”. And freedom of software means that users are able to run the program, study it, change it and redistribute it with or without charges.

For more details please read https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

Takeaway Points:

1. Richard Stallman at least deserves same amount of applause as Linus Torvalds does.
2. Free Software does not refer to price of the software, it refers to freedom of using it.

 

Topics :

• Evidence that users develop and modify products for their own use
• Innovation is concentrated among lead users
• Lead users’ innovation often becomes commercial products

General misconception that novel products/ services are developed by manufacturers. Even the term ‘consumers’ implicitly suggests that users are not involved in product development

 

Many users innovate

User innovation is basically when innovation of products are done by user firms or individual users rather than suppliers. Example of study done to show the frequency of modifying or developing industrial and consumer products. The study was done on people who really care about the product type. Surgical equipment in universities, extreme sport activities, pipe hangers and mountain biking equipment.

A finding was that the innovation rate dropped as the interest for the particular product was not much. For instance outdoor consumer products such as winter jackets. Only 10% people replied saying they did but again the 10% of a million is a big number.

So what leads to this innovation or modification – qualitative observation. The modifications are minor and by time it’s a cumulative process of combining all the minor changes. Example is a factory where all the work which was done by manual labor by time is fully replaced by machines. And again these machines were invention of common workmen. Earlier examples are textile and gun manufacturing firms.

 

Lead users theory

The characteristics of lead user:

1)They are the leading edge of the market trend. That is there current needs will be experienced by many users later.

2)They anticipate high benefits from obtaining a solution to their needs and may innovate.

 

Evidence of innovation in lead users

I       Innovation in industrial product user firm

In 1988, von Hippel and Urban conducted a study on printed circuit computer aided design software produced by different firms and the amount of modifications the users did to satisfy there need of the software. The major goal of the users were to increase the density of the board.

A sample size of 138 people using the software were cluster analyzed with 38 people put in the lead user cluster and the remaining the non-lead user cluster. The result was that 87% of the lead users modified the board while 1% of the other cluster did modification.

The interesting fact is that commercial attractiveness of the user modified software was significantly preferred by users compared to the best tools in market at that time even with double the price

II      Innovation in libraries

Morrison, Robert and von Hippel in 2000 did a study on the modifications done on OPAC(online public access system) by there users which were libraries. 102 libraries in Australia was taken as the sample. The libraries were ranked on basis of ‘lead edge status’(LES) and LES is a construct of lead users that was created by Morrison.

It was found 26% of the total libraries made modifications to the OPAC system provided by the vendors to meet there local needs. And the majority of the modifications were made by the lead users.

These features that were modified were taken to the vendors of the system and they felt that 70% of the modifications done by the users would help the companies benefit and most of these features were incorporated into the later versions of OPAC.

III     “Consumer” innovation in sports commodities

In 2003, Franke and Shah conducted study on 4 sports communities in Germany- Canyoning, Sailplaning, Bordercross  and semi-professional cycling. A total sample of 137 was considered to study user innovation.

32% of the users made modifications to their sports equipment and it was not the same in each cases. The amount of innovation depended on the complexity of the equipment.

It was found that 23% of the new modifications were later incorporated in the equipments due to its commercial potential.

IV    Innovation among hospital surgeons

Lutjhe in 2003, sampled 10 clinics in Germany to study the characteristics and features affecting the user innovation.

Out of 262 medical doctors, 22% reported to have made modifications in medical equipment used. Lutjhe found that most of the modifications were made by lead users. The lead users were modifying as a solution to the problems they face and they were technically skillful. The only barrier to innovating was found out be legal problems and liability risks.

The commercial value of the innovations was immense and later about 48% of the innovations by lead users were marketed by manufacturers of medical equipments.

Summary

Lead users contribute most of the Innovation among users. Most of these innovations become commercialized.

 

 

I had heard of companies organising hack day competitions but had no idea what people do in such events until recently when i participated in Tele2 Hack Day event on 10th of November, 2015. The event was for one day. The initial motivation for going to such an event came from the free food that they were offering. When we first went there, i was expecting to work on some ideas that the organisers would give us but this was different. We were asked to bring up our own idea, develop it and pitch the idea to the jury. This was unexpected and we were supposed to be a four member team. Though the organisers had already given us contact details of the team members, we could not be in touch until the event day except for one guy whom i knew from college. Only three of us from my team showed up on the day. The other guy was a student from Stockholm University. For the first half an hour we did not talk to each other apart from the initial Hi and hello. Then we asked a member from the volunteer team to help us in suggesting some ideas. She did not give us any idea but told that we can work on anything we want. So, we started with discussing the problems we face in our daily lives. One issue we all faced was carrying too many cards in our wallet. We all agreed to work on a solution to this problem. The volunteers also felt that this was an issue that most of the people face and a solution to such a problem would be a good idea. The three of us had never worked together and one was a complete stranger. But it did not take time for us to work together and shoot ideas to solve the problem. This competition is not only about competing to win the prize but also to help us know different people, people from different backgrounds and also how well one can interact with them and work as a team. This kind of opportunity also helps in networking with industry peoples. The executives of the company mingle with you and are as excited as we are while competing with others.

After putting different ideas on the board we decided to go for one idea that could be done with in a short time. We started to work on the idea. Each one of us were from different study track. I am from Human computer interaction, one was from Embedded systems and the Stockholm University guy was from Game development. So, we worked on different aspects of the idea. My part was to create a mobile app. Before this event i had not made any mobile application. Before this, I had just started with the android app development tutorials but did not have sufficient knowledge to build an app. So, i thought this we would be a great opportunity to fast track my learning of app development. We had to build a basic app with fake datas. I googled the parts i needed for the app. This helped me in getting the idea of how apps are created using android studio software. It took me around 3 hours to complete the basic app which was quite cool for me as i had never build an app. The other members designed the backend of the service we wanted to give to the people to simplify their many cards problem. So in five hours we were ready with the concept for our idea and a mock app to demonstrate and pitch our idea. We still had another twohours left. So, we thought of utilising the time and started playing darts that was beside our area. There were three other teams in the same working area who were wondering what were we upto. They all worked very hard on their ideas, building stuffs and we were playing. This kind a felt weird at the start but once we assured ourself that we had already done what we wanted to do, we continued with the darts. At around 4:30pm we were asked to assemble in the main area with the idea and start pitching to jury members who would visit different teams one by one. Every one liked our idea and they all felt the necessity of such a solution as every one carried many cards with them which they did not like. Some of them were amazed as we had a created a demo app within the time allocated to us.

The entire event brought up new skills in us which we had not explored before. We mingled with unknown peoples. Worked as a team with them, came up with ideas, worked to develop a solution within a short span and pitch the ideas to the jury. This was quite amazing as we had not done such stuffs before but it did not feel like we cannot do these things. At no point were we nervous or doubtful about our idea. I think this confidence and the belief that we had come up with a satisfactory solution helped us win the competition. Though at first it was surprising and hard to believe when we were announced as the winners but later on thinking back on the whole day work we had put up and the kind of solution we provided cemented our claim on the prize. The prize was a Moet and Chandon Champagne which is still with me and we have to decide on a day to celebrate our achievement.

Stockholm Tech Meetup was an event that we join with Paramvir Singh on 16th of November. It was in Hilton Slussen. Them main guest was TeliaSonera. TeliaSonera is a leading phone carrier from Norway to Nepal, but Telia has recently made some big investments to some Swedish startups. These startups actually growth exponentially with their investment.

Firstly they started the event by talking about recent developments in Nordic startups. Especially in sweden many startups has been created and gain success very quickly. I really liked this part because it gives me inspiration and motivation to make business in Sweden.
When they were talking about the sucess about Nordic startups this picture appeared and then they presented several news about sale of swedish startups with high profits.

The guy who made the presentation was very professional and experience in silicon valley long time. His name is Tyler Crowley and he is the organizer of this event. After the opening presentation, 3 different startups made their pitch and the main purpose was the gain of TeliaSonera investment. First Startup was called Ice Cream. Basically it was an photo sharing app but there the app selects the photos to share with your friend automatically and allow you to choose which photos to share.

The other startup was blood control service which gives to customer detailed analysis of information about their blood and body. And the last and the most popular startup was called ORB. They were giving 3D music service with a platform like gaming with access of music, lyrics, videos and more. They good point of this startup was they were not trying to compete against Spotify. Their purpose was to create additional service for them. I think initially it is better not to have big enemies.
Finally, next event was announced and it will be on 7th December. I am looking forward to it. Additionally there will be an event called Internet Discovery Day which seems very useful as well. I totally recommend everybody to join next one.

I joined Armada and got accepted as a career fair host. I wanted to share with you my experience.

One of the main reasons I joined was to be able to meet Swedish students. I had found it hard to get to know any Swedish because in our program we don’t have any. I had also seen that based on interviews with over 21,000 expats in 39 countries, Sweden was named “the worse country for making friends“.  It has been the first year since 1981 that Armada accepted international students and focused on diversity therefore I thought it was a good opportunity to get integrated.

The second main reason was to get to know new companies and be able to do networking.

I got in a group of 12 students and got assigned the company Erasteel Kloster. I did not know about the company before but I looked for information online. Sadly it wasn’t related to my field of study but I still felt it was a great opportunity, get to talk to experienced professional people. Other students from my group did get companies which I was more interested on, such as Intel or Cybercom. I also had the opportunity to meet them before the fair.

It is important to expand your network of contacts because your chances of securing a job increase considerably and at the same time it is nice to get to know new people and get advice and help about your future.

I also applied for a personal meeting with the company Semcon and got accepted. I had seen in their webpage that they focused a lot on innovation and new technologies and I wanted to know more about it. During the talk, the interviewer explained me about the way they offer their Master thesis (you can make a proposal and work on your own idea. “We’re always looking for bright and innovative ideas that can be developed together with students”).I believe it can be a good choice if you have an idea and would like to work on it. 

During the fair I got to know a lot of students and company representants.  I was very lucky because the people that came from my company were great and now I have them as contact on LinkedIn. Also my Armada group was very friendly and always spoke in English so that the few internationals could always understand, some of us have even met outside the armada events. 

 I would totally recomend to join any of the different organizations inside KTH and get to know new people and interact with companies.  

As Martin Duursma( VP Citrix Labs & CTO Office Chair said:

“Innovation, more and more is a social activity. It occurs at the edges between teams, when people collide in unexpected places, to spark new ideas”

Blanca M.