USCO project: Openness is a key to success
The USCO event “Openness is a key to success” brought world-class speakers to the K Campus in Helsinki.
USCO, a joint project of Laurea University of Applied Sciences and the University of Tampere, has helped Finnish companies develop their ability to utilise digitalisation. The K Group is one of the eight organisations involved.
On 30 October, the K Group and the USCO project hosted a joint event under the name “Openness is a key to success”, which brought together top experts in digitalisation, innovation and data analytics from Finland and other countries. The keynote speeches were delivered by Professor Wim Vanhaverbeke (University of Surrey) and Dr Mohamed Zaki (University of Cambridge).
Professor Vanhaverbeke, from Belgium, specialises in innovation ecosystems and open innovation. In his speech, Vanhaverbeke focused on ways in which open innovation can benefit cooperation between small companies and large organisations.
In Vanhaverbeke’s first example, a small start-up made use of technology rejected by a large corporation, ultimately developing it into a success product for itself. The second example reversed the roles, presenting a small company that created a new technology solution for Phillips Corporation.
Mohamed Zaki, of the University of Cambridge, examined changing customer experiences in the increasingly digital world. Customer experience can be approached from three perspectives: the digital, physical and social realms.The overall experience can be conceptualised in a three-dimensional space.
- The challenge to organisations is to transition from their traditional position to a new one, which calls for brand new characteristics, Zaki explains.
- The health care sector, for example, is undergoing a change from a characteristically physical and social experience to a digital one – without forgetting about social interaction.
Participants in the morning event also learned about the experiences of the K Group, one of the event organisers, regarding the use of data to create increasingly better services for customers. Read more about the use of data analytics in the K Group.