I participated for four nights to Digia’s API Hackatemia, the acronym API referring to Application Programming Interface i.e. how you can access either data or system of a company or system. The Hackatemia was a four-day event for technical and business development experts joining forces to learn about APIOps® Cycles, an open source method developed by Digia and in addition to learning, 16 teams were competing in developing products, services and APIs to meet the consumer or society needs.

The ideation phase was like service design, just ideating crazy ideas and then funneling them into a concrete service.  I would argue that with APIs you create services in the way service dominant logic defines a service. The physical object is just a mean to access the service being that formed of data and /or devices. As a matter of fact, the end user does not even need to think what the thinking process has predecessed the end-result.

The logic in API thinking builds naturally on loosely coupled networks. You can call the others as partners, service providers or clients but without ecosystem thinking it would be challenging to utilize or benefit of the APIs.

The API canvas has a lot of similarities with Business model canvas and Service Business Model Canvas. As the logic was easy to capture based on service design thinking it was also easy to start thinking about the business model to be created.

One thing I am missing or which I would like to learn more is how to illustrate or document the revenue stream on one-slider or as a picture. Of course, one can create an own picture, but a template would help. I would like to see this also on service business model canvas as that is needed to have a go.

Most of the solutions used artificial intelligence and varied from follow-up systems to elderly to remote health control and health personnel appointment. Our solution was called Google Fridge addressing climate change by diminishing food waste. By scanning the batch codes from the product, the fridge warns the consumer two days before the expiry date and proposes recipes to utilize the ingredient. The software does in addition the shopping and compares the shopping basket prices so that the consumer gets the best bargain.

I truly had fun during these four nights. I do not ‘speak’ the languages the coders do as I always thought that a python is a snake, but Java Python is hot in artificial intelligence scene.

To sum up the event a key learning is that you need a diverse set of people to work on APIs. The business developers need to be there to design the business model and the tech people to make it all happen. Diversity is truly a beauty.