Nordic Business Forum & Telia Case 1 to Case 2

Week 40 (02 – 08/10)

Hey peeps! Please discover here what we learned during our previous week. On Monday and Tuesday, a big event was organized. We didn’t have class on Monday like we do every week because something else was planned. All the business students were attending the Nordic Business Forum Live Stream Event in Helsinki City. The concept is that the Nordic Event was going on in Helsinki at their main headquarters with more than 7000 top executives attending. This event was streamed live in the Helsinki Think Company close to the University of Helsinki. In that way, we, students, could also follow that event. I could give you the whole schedule of the two-days’ event but I’ll only give you the Facebook link if you are really interested. https://www.facebook.com/events/137988230137929/?active_tab=about

The main purpose of this event is to inspire people. Top business stars and world class speakers have the most interesting speeches about leadership, purpose and responsibility.

In those two days, 17 excellent speakers had between 20 minutes and one hour time on stage to talk about their research, work or experience. To point out some major presentations, I’ll give you some names you might recognize. Will Smith, Nick Vujicic, Bojan Slat, Kjell Nordström or Patric Lencioni.

Let’s now talk about the things that I really liked and memorized about that two-day event. My favourite one was Nick Vujicic. I already knew him before that event. I watched a lot of videos about his inspiring speeches, and I was never disappointed. The main idea he gave through his presentation was to never give up, even if you fail, keep trying. He had a very strong message about the gratitude we should have. Boyan Slat had a speech about a very actual major problem. This man was quite surprising! He’s only 23 years-old and wants to clean plastic off the whole ocean. His determination about his project is inspiring. The third very interesting speaker was Stéphane Garelli. He had a talk about robots, which made me realize how fast they are evolving! We are at a point, where robots should be defined because they are starting to look like humans. Mr. Garelli said: “Up till now, we have been better at lying than robots. If we cannot lie anymore then where is our advantage?” He’s pointing out the fact that robots beat the world champions in poker and chess.

To conclude those two first days of the week, I will briefly introduce 5 other speekers. Estonia’s power start-up duo, Kaspar Korjusand and Taavet Hinrikus, the launchers of Skype. They talked about how the Estonian Government reacted well with Uber by sitting around a table with the stakeholders and defining new legislation to allow them to stay in Estonia without any trouble! As well as Rachel Botsman who pointed out that AirBnB, eBay and Uber were the first to introduce products without any marketplace. Adam Grant had two talks. Both about entrepreneurship. He talks about values company leaders should have. How management has evolved. He defines the values a leader should prioritize: generosity, humanity, relationship and autonomy. Patrick Lencioni, one of the ten gurus everybody should know when it comes to companies, talked about employee’s happiness. And, last but not least, Kjell Nordström, who is comparing the world to a matrix. Pointing out that we are living in a planet of cities, not a planet of countries any more.

Ticket

Will Smith

Minni Ruhtinas

IT professional

IT professional

Let’s move on to Thursday, our Telia presentation day at Otaniemi Campus. We had the opportunity to be listened by two Telia employees (IT professionals). They were very attentive to our presentations, and all the ideas we discussed about our case 1. Our main objective was to find ideas about how to improve Telia’s website. We had to focus on the subscriptions to develop a unique “digital-only-product”. I was very happy about our presentation because we brought interesting ideas. The Telia guys wrote a lot down and asked the right questions after our presentation which makes me think that they were interested in our solutions. After those presentations, Minni Ruhtinas, the development manager at Telia that we met before, introduced the second case we must work on.

Thanks for reading and see you next week!