The crème de la crème

The lucky winners are

Societal influence | Customer experience | Robust code | Disruption | Propellerhead | Best performing team | Epic purchasing

Societal Influence Award

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Winner

Yrityskylä learning environment

Yrityskylä is a comprehensive digital learning environment that provides students of primary school upper classes with lessons in society, economy, work life and entrepreneurship. This learning environment combines new, functional pedagogies like gamification and simulation with interaction with the real world outside the school. In addition to digital learning content, the concept includes teacher training on the substance matter and learning methods.

In addition to educational goals, the aim is to foster interaction between companies and schools in order to give students and teachers deeper understanding of work life and economy. Already, more than 140,000 students have participated in the program.

  • Name: Yrityskylä
  • Material & methods: Experiential learning powered by pedagogy and a sprinkle of web tech
  • Published: 2009
Main judge Jyrki Kasvi’s comments

The goal of Yrityskylä is to give all Finnish school students skills and confidence required for living productive lives and navigating in Finnish society.

While all the finalists had their merits, the concept of Yrityskylä felt like having the greatest and most long-standing societal impact of the finalists in the category.

The young of the nation are its future, and increasing their abilities has decades of impact, not just in a financial sense, but in terms of social inclusion and other aspects of their lives. What is more, the concept of Yrityskylä is scaleable to international educational markets, expanding its impact even further.

The Yrityskylä simulation game for school students is a good example of ICT enabling the creation of entertaining and compelling learning experiences.

Disruption Award

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Winner

Juhlapesu

Juhlapesu offers unlimited number of car washes for a monthly payment. The service is operated with a smartphone app and the customer, i.e. car, is recognized by the registration plate.

A subscription-based pricing model combined with unmanned washing stations, made possible by technological innovation, disrupts the traditional business logic.

  • Name: Juhlapesu - Always a clean car
  • Material & methods: A blend of lush software & hardware on solid UX
  • Published: 2011
Main judge Risto Kuulasmaa’s comments

Juhlapesu challenges an established industry and offers added value with a new generation and internationally scalable car wash service. The service has established a satisfied customer base outside of Finland, too, and is profitable.

We dedicate the Blue Arrow Disruption Award to all entrepreneurs who see a chance to challenge old thinking with the new. Resistance comes from resistance to change built on defending acquired benefits and keeping things the way they’ve always been. The entrepreneur’s journey requires persistence and faith in the ability to offer a smoother and more competitive alternative to what’s on the market. We’re giving entrepreneur Erkki Aminoff and Juhlapesu this award for the example they’re setting and the fact that they inspire us to believe in a more entrepreneurial Finland that lives off digitalisation and disruption.

Customer Experience Award

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Winner

Nordic Sky Entertainment

The Nordic Sky entertainment system plays an important role in Finnair’s digital services. It provides comfort and peace-of-mind, entertaining passengers and allowing them to manage their time on board effectively.

NSE system presents the user with a consistent, modern and spacious user experience. As an example of work carried out in a uniquely challenging domain, the system succeeds in satisfying all basic use cases with delight. The system functions without a glitch. For future development, more unexpected delight and playfulness would be desired.

  • Name: Nordic Sky Entertainment
  • Material & methods: Airbus A350 + Stellar Design & Code
  • Published: 7.10.2015
Main judge Marina Vahtola’s comments

The service is holistic and improves the customer service during the flights remarkably from the beginning to the end of the flight.

The service has been planned in a very careful way with respect to the details.

The service has a central role of the whole service experience and it raises the whole satisfaction of the journey of the passengers during the flight.

Many passengers choose especially the planes with this system, when they are flying very long distances for these reasons.

The service offers the passengers the following concrete possibilities:

  • information about the flight itself and the things which are happening during the flight
  • tax free shopping is more flexible with the help of this system
  • the versatile assortment of music and movies entertains the customers in a pleasant way
  • the up-to-date information of the events during the flights and after the landing make the passengers feel more peaceful and safe
  • the Nordic Sky Wi-fi service offers the passengers service free of charge; the passengers are able to order taxi and different services (excursions and activities etc.) in the destination town

The customer feedback has been mostly very positive. The constant feedback makes it possible to develop the service together with the customers in the future.

Best Performing Team Award

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Winner

Elisa growth hacking team, Reaktor

Elisa Growth team is a new joint development team of Elisa and Reaktor. They are more than just a self-organizing agile software development team. They are a self-directing, lean startup, business driven money making machine. They refer to themselves as “post-agile”.

A team that crosses traditional boundaries. Constant look past the team’s own responsibilities by challenging, coaching and supporting on a larger scale.

  • Name: Elisa Kasvutiimi Reaktor
  • Material & methods: Post-agile driven experiments with a spray of champagne
  • Published: April 2015
Main judge Jukka Lindström’s comments

A team that crosses traditional boundaries. Constant look past the team’s own responsibilities by challenging, coaching and supporting on a larger scale.

Epic purchasing Award

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Winner

K-Ruoka app

In purchasing, the goal of Kesko was to find an agile vendor to build new and high-quality mobile services for our customers, but one that could operate within the parameters of our purchase model, too. Thanks to open communication and a shared goal of finding the best ways to collaborate from the very beginning, we were able to change the way digital services are developed at Kesko.

Kesko went through revolutionary agile transformation and launched a successful mobile application despite a long history rigid procurement processes. The market-fit of the new product was constantly validated. Collaboration between business, procurement and supplier was based on trust and transparency. The purchasing of the service development was successfully designed and steered to avoid any supplier lock-in.

  • Name: K-ruoka
  • Material & methods: User centric design & agile development team
  • Published: 5.10.2015
Main judge Mikael Jungner’s comments

A major corporation manages to retool their purchasing so that it’s suitable for lean projects. The service had a well-defined target audience and a clear goal. The service was piloted to make sure it hit the defined targets and scaled afterwards. Kesko transparent project management was based on feedback. It was obviously a great partnership that allowed both companies to utilise their expertise to the fullest. Using open platforms and common technologies avoided vendor lock. If a giant manages to challenge their own processes and buy smart, there are no excuses for the rest of us.

Propellerhead Award

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Winner

Industryhack organizers

This group has shown evidence of impact in many fields of new innovation scene.

Industryhack team has organised 11 great events, each merging 12-15 hackathon teams with an industry company that wants to win in Industrial Internet.

Absolutely impressive and diverse set of activities in various fields. Uniting and powerful act. Nationwide success: these people have been able to get attention form big organizations and keeping the events coming time after time despite very hard work required. Very good impact.

  • Name: Industryhack team (Juho, Mikael, Petri & Ville)
  • Material & methods: Combine people from Slush, AppCampus, Startup Sauna and Autolla Nepaliin with a fixation for industrial internet
  • Published: Since 2015
Main judge Jarkko Oikarinen’s comments

Industryhack events are an excellent idea to bring more innovation into more traditional industrial companies, by connecting hackers and industry. Industryhack events have impressive and diverse activities in various fields. They have demonstrated nationwide success and high impact in driving innovation and boosting R&D work in several companies. These events have required tremendous amount of work, in influencing large industrial companies and organizing actual events, ensuring their success.

Robust Code Award

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Winner

Objection.js

Objection.js is an ORM for Node.js which supports new JavaScript standards and most SQL databases. Objection.js makes SQL operations easy, still permitting the full power of SQL.

Unlike many other open source libraries, Objection.js is exceptionally well documented code with a comprehensive test suite. Its choice of modern ECMAScript technologies makes it at the same time backwards compatible and forward looking. While the library is still young, it has a potential to become Node.js developers’ swiss army knife for databases.

  • Name: Objection.js
  • Material & methods: Javascript, SQL & open source
  • Published: 2014
Main judge Monty Widenius’s comments

What does robust code mean? It means software that still runs while we humans sleep; it can be used and operated by millions of people worldwide; it has a solid developer base instead of being reliant on one super hero coder; and most importantly - it does its job incredibly well, so that the end user receives her delight.

Objection.js is an actively developed open-source project with a steady user base. It is exceptionally well documented and provides a comprehensive suite of tests. This predicts it a great future as the developers’ choice for database access. Objection.js is a great example of how one should develop an active open source project.