Women in Tech 2015 was arranged on 7th October in Helsinki with the theme “Make a difference!” and lured women of all ages with an interest in the future of business and technology to participate.

The guest speakers Stephanie Keller-Bottom and Tammy Noll motivated us as women to be the change we want to see.

Besides talking on the issue of women in tech, Stephanie introduced current trends of which corporate venturing standed out to me – that corporations are developing startup mentality and launching projects inside corporations. Tammy encouraged us to have more tolerance for risk of failure and more resilience. We should “fall gracefully” and move on with our focus – with devotion.

After the speeches I participated a nicely organized and lead workshop by Tieto Experience Hub’s Ksenia Avetisova and Fanny Vakkila on the theme Industry match-making as a strategic tool for innovation.

Tieto is approaching innovation and design with strategy driven collaborative models, engaging in the strategic themes of gamification of health, medializing commerce and energizing economy. They believe that innovations with breakthrough potential can be discovered in the hot spots between industries, companies and cultures. The goal is to create maximum impact and superior customer experience.

In the workshop we were divided into 8 teams. We started off with sharing our “superpowers” .

Our challenge was how to enable each and every person to stay in control of their privacy, across digital and physical worlds. We would ponder questions such as “Are we aware of the types of data we are sharing and who is collecting them? Who owns our digital information and decides how to use it – do we have a say in it?”

We worked through the workshop in 4 different phases..

…from selecting our target audience and its challenges…
…into choosing two different industries, analyzing their benefits and enablerers…
…after which we would create the concept and value proposition by joining the two chosen industries…
…and ended the session in the pitch of our concept in 5 minutes.

We chose retail and healthcare as the industries to be mixed and mingled and the busy 25-35 year olds spreading their info on hundreds online services as our target group. You can see our concept idea in the picture below – the customer is the owner of the data, which in this case is for example the purchase histories in diverse online stores and data of diverse healthcare records. By using the broker’s service that authorizes the use of the customer data for retail and healthcare industry actors, she/he can grant access to the data to selected participants and for exchange she/he receives benefits such as discounts. The industry on its behalf can further analyze the accessed data and produce for example targeted groceries’ marketing based on shopping habits and health data. Scary, huh? But it would be the customer’s own decision to trade with the data.

You can see briefly the outcomes of the workshops in Tieto’s brief here.

Inspiring and innovation bursting workshop indeed!