From Akin Akintola
From the 26th Feb to the 2nd March we were at the Mobile World Congress 2017. 5 hectic days packed with great encounters, some crazy disruptive ideas, a productive collaborative mindset... and great fun!
Many companies are excited about the prospects of working in a community with others across the globe in a simple collaborative environment with the assurance that non-compete concerns would be respected and addressed while the start-ups were excited about the opportunities to expand their reach and scale in an easy way. Together, we looked at some catchy use-cases where we intend to help Nokia build ecosystems around their products, like Nokia’s Eden-NET developer community.
During the Nokia Partner event, we had the opportunity to introduce Open Ecosystem Network to more than 40 big players and we got assurances from several Nokia partners that they would contribute with their assets, challenges and R&D teams to begin working with a bottom-up approach to defining the products of the future that could develop into “joint go to market” opportunities.
At 4YFN, we had a great time with the Street Demos, talking with a few cool start-ups and incubators about shaping the future together. One example was AISTECH, a group of young great minds building real-life nanosatellites the size of a shoebox for aviation tracking and surveillance. Another is X-engineering disrupting fintech with smart-pay solutions for any device able to make payments at any POS terminals in the world.
Overall, we met over 90 companies!
One partner commented “this is crazy” while the CEO of a communication service provider said “It is amazing to see that Nokia is willing to work in such an open way with their customers”. All in all, the platform was very well received.
Now it’s the time to get back to work and bring some of the great ideas we discussed at MWC17 to life. The opportunities are huge and I believe bringing only 20% of these to reality would spark a significant change to the way corporates work in the industry: it promises to be a great ride!