Start-up companies received feedback from students

There is a common belief that business ideas have a greater potential to succeed if the user is involved in the innovation process. ØIT wanted to turn theory into practice by arranging a workshop focusing on user-driven innovation within the fields of mobile- and web services.

The 11 of May ØIT arranged a workshop with the purpose to evaluate user-driven innovation. A number of entrepreneurs were invited to give short presentations on their business ideas that concerned mobile and web services for students which was the topic of the day. Each company had the possibility to meet with smaller groups of students of varying age to discuss and get feedback on their particular service.

The workshop is a part of the project Living Labs Øresund and aims to find methods to fasten up the commercialization process of service innovations. It is also a way to offer a forum for user feedback to new companies in an early stage of the development process.

Skyforge that was one of the participating companies introduced their user friendly budget tool MyBudget which is supposed to be integrated in an existing Internet bank service.

– It’s nice to meet with the people who actually are going to use our service instead of only talking to business people from the banking sector, said Niklas Silfverström, one of the founders of Skyforge.

Jonas Andersson from Precise Biometrics presented their services with fingerprint verification technique by demonstrating how to book a flight, pay, check in and board only with a fingerprint reader and a mobile phone. Nils Axiö who runs the student portal TagToTell.se and Annika Eliasson with her E-learning tool for writing theses appreciated the feedback from the students.

– I got a lot to think about and I’m going to make some changes in my priority list, said Nils Axiö.

The students who participated all enjoyed to meet the entrepreneurs and test their new services. –It’s fun to have tried an emerging service that maybe one day will be used by millions of people all over the world, said Lisa Davidsson, one of the students.