The Digital Impact Day event was organized by 3 universities from Sweden, Finland and Germany including Mid Sweden University, Tampere University and HM University of Applied Sciences on May 4, 2022. This event considers students to hold many important keys to sustainable world development through digital impact. Its concept has attracted the students from many fields including Applied Business Innovation, Entrepreneur and Team Leadership, Green economy and digital innovation, Master Information Systems, Eco Entrepreneur for Sustainable Development, Smart IoT, International Master Program in Ecotechnology and Sustainability, Journalism, Data, Marketing Communication, etc. The main goal of this event is to encourage the students working together in team to find the innovative ideas to solve the different challenges considering the digitalization and the democracy role as an important impact for the sustainable changes. I came to this event hoping to connect with international students who have the same interest in this concept and find an opportunity for myself to develop and test the feasibility of my digital-related business idea. Generally, the variety of participants who have much different knowledge and experiences has created the good opportunity for the innovative idea generation and development and made the event become more interesting.

How the event and ideation proceeded in my team

It has been a great chance to get to know about DIGG, the agency for Swedish digital government and to help propose to DIGG the sustainable ideas to improve to meet the needs related welfare, society, Swedish people’s need. 4 groups of students were required to solve the same challenge: “What will the democracy look like with the progress of digitalization”, using the global sustainable development goals as the key drive.

Our team under the name “Reindeer” including Sarah from Germany, Alias from Sweden and I from Finland started to work together excitedly. At first, we tried to learn and analyse the challenges, and then identify who will be the judges of the pitch and will listen to our idea presentation. This way has kept us from straying from the assigned tasks and saved us time to work more productively. It was also a good idea to learn about the strength of each person in team to divide the tasks. Sarah has shown her efficiency in using Miro website for better team collaboration at the idea generation stage and in dealing with PowerPoint tool for the pitch presentation. We spent a lot of time understanding the Swedish people’s needs and discussing to come up with 3 most outstanding creative ideas. Sarah’s idea was to solve the issue of high house renting costs, Alias’ idea was to find the tools supporting the immigrants in Sweden to understand the important announcements or policies of government by their own languages while my idea was to help the immigrant job seekers have the equal opportunities in finding works in Sweden. Finally, we decided to pick up the idea which is the most suitable for the DIGG’s challenges and requirements which were aimed to the democracy outcomes by the progress of digitalization: digital inclusion vs digital exclusion, to pitch and develop. We named our solution as the Upseeking, a platform easily connecting the companies and immigrants using a big data and smart searching supportive tools. This platform is supposed to create more chances and more advantages for immigrants to connect and approach the hiring companies easily and effectively while oppositely also to help the companies in searching the most suitable potential candidates from the big data source of immigrants. Solutions that can be developed globally to help EU countries solve the problems of human resource shortage by utilizing the potential immigrant workforce in their countries.

After generating the idea, we started arranging them in our presentation file using NABC pitching method tool (N for Need, A for Approach/ Solution, B for Benefits and C for Competitors). This tool has been used throughout our creative concept development. All 4 elements were important for us to consider closely to make sure we were working to solve the practical needs and to have the most optimized solution. Then, with the feedbacks from the coaches from 2 times pitches, we could sharpen better our innovative ideas and practice better our pitching skill to become more confident in the last pitch to DIGG agency.

My learning and findings about innovation process

I think our team has worked so well together. Even though there was time when each of us could not perform the best and I myself lost the chance to pitch in the last round because of the unexpected technical problem, I think all of us has learnt so well how to work in team and to encourage each other to develop better our ideas. From strangers, we became closer thanks to our collaborative team effort. Even though things didn’t go as smoothly as we expected, we all experience the good feeling of achieving the most satisfying result.

For myself, I could achieve the purpose of testing the business idea and recognised there are so many things to consider and solve with that idea. Our solution met quite well the need as the coaches mentioned, however we could not clearly develop the points and it was hard to present them to our judge totally also in such the short time.

Losing the chance to win the pitch meant also we could not meet again to develop our idea further with the DIGG agency. However, I think all other team may feel as pity as us and may hope to have more chances like this in the future to learn and develop their innovative skills and ideas in the international connection environments.