Last week we went to Switzerland for the 6th edition of the Innovation World Cup Conference Neuchâtel. It was an action-packed day, filled with explicit innovations and creative IoT minds making the day fascinating and very informative.
In the morning, the participants had the chance to learn from three different tutorials and hands-on workshops held by world leading tech giants (STMicroelectronics and Microsoft, Geeny by Telefónica NEXT and Gemalto) how the latest IoT technologies can be used to enhance their existing product portfolio or to develop totally new products and solutions.
And after the developer lunch, they joined the business development and networking session of the Innovation World Cup Conference, getting involved in great talks with leading partners, inspiring pitches from Swiss start-ups and exciting networking opportunities.
But as we value your opinion more than ours, we asked one of our speakers, for his thoughts on the Conference. Now over to Mark Melnykowyz, Artist Engineer at Idezo GmbH, disruptive Swiss start-up, past Innovation World Cup success:
“In building start-up ideas and moving from prototype concept to a real customer value proposition, it’s always helpful to present, obtain feedback, and iterate. This process is helped greatly when given the opportunity to present to different audiences. We feel fortunate have been given the opportunity to attend three IWC events in 2017, in different geographical locations and with different focuses. These included the opportunity to pitch at the MWC2017 in Barcelona, Spain, DMEXCO in Cologne, Germany, and finally in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. These experiences have enabled us to connect with potential partners and customers for different phases of realizing our audience analytics product.
The IWC conference in Neuchâtel was an interesting event, since the event brings together participants from both the start-up and corporate worlds. This is important for seeing how our product concept is viewed by different people, since a person focused on IoT development will have a technology view, while a brand manager will be more focused on the customer value of the product. These conversations are very important for identifying the core values and unique selling points of our product and refining our company strategy.
I always enjoy learning about new technologies and the best way to do this is to put something together, even if it’s a small project, like connecting a microcontroller to the cloud. In Neuchâtel at the IoT developer workshop with STMicroelectronics and Microsoft, I learned about the strategy for Azure and integration with IoT devices, not just from the connectivity view, but the long-term value proposition of integrating IoT data into the Azure ecosystem for higher level machine learning approaches to business intelligence and providing customer value, not simply ingesting gigabytes of data into a system. Additionally, I learned about the STM32 Nucleo prototyping platform, and the development pipeline possibilities of moving from prototype and testing to a product serial production strategy with STMicroelectronics. Later in the day the workshop experience balanced well with the presentations from CSEM, Gemalto, EBV Elektronik, Commission for Technology and Innovation CTI, STMicroelectronics, Geeny and LoRa Alliance to contextualize how to go from idea to product. The final start-up presentations (from us, Gait Up, modum.io and Hivemind) then illustrated well the journeys of different companies, which gave great insight into the practical nature of building from an idea to a company.”
All in all, it was a great day of insights and learning for all of us!
Thank you to the speakers for their presentations and to our regional partners CSEM, AlpICT and Commission for Technology and Innovation CTI, for supporting us with the organisation of this great day, we look forward to Innovation World Cup Conference Neuchâtel 2018!
Want to see more pictures? Have a look at the Innovation World Cup Conference Neuchâtel 2017 we posted on Facebook.
Want to pitch at international conference and make connections that might chance the fate of your company? Join the IOT/WT Innovation World Cup with your innovative solution. Many great stories start here!
