The guy with the dream job
I didn’t go to Slush 2016. I was close though, because I had agreed to meet a Slush visitor, a guy from Toyota’s future projects department, at the Holiday Inn just next door. A lovely chap, very polite, very Japanese. He has one of the dream jobs in the world: he is creating visions for Toyota for 30 years ahead: what will transportation and cars be at that time?
While we were sipping Finnish lager in very busy Holiday Inn bar next to Slush, he walked through a list of questions that he had carefully prepared in his notebook. One of the first ones was “What are the most interesting projects that you have done at Nordkapp?”. As expected, I hadn’t really prepared for this, so I started telling about interesting projects and partnerships from the past year or two that popped to my mind in random order at that moment.
What’s interesting?
First I told about Strm, a project with Santander, where we redesigned banking for the millennials, with a new concept of social money. Then about ING, a bank that had just been transformed from a traditional organisation to a new agile one, driven by digital and design.
After that I continued with Suunto, a device manufacturer that is moving into platform business with their new Movesense platform. Then I told about a traditional telco that is completely renewing itself, and about an energy provider preparing for revolution through distributed energy production and renewable energy sources. And about automotive industry that is going toward the biggest changes in the history ever with electronic cars, shared ownership and mobility as a service.
After going through all this I realised that everything I listed there is in the middle of dramatic change, or as the hand-waving consultants call it — transformation. It seems that we attract change, and change attracts us.
Nothing is a coincidence
After pondering this for a while. I concluded that this is not a coincidence. People who work at Nordkapp are open-minded, enthusiastic designers that want to nudge this world towards the better.
We prefer to work with companies that are forward-looking and optimistic; companies that are not protective of the future but want to be part of forming it. When we partner with like-minded people who share this passion and the same goals the work is simply fruitful and enjoyable and it’s easy to give one’s best for it.
Where’s the change?
At this point, you might ask why I didn’t go to Slush. I did attend the year before. To be honest, I was a little bored. Slush has successfully helped lift Finland’s start-up scene and is an important meeting place for technology minded people. However, what I mostly saw there was incremental work and gimmicks.
The real transformation takes place somewhere else. For example, on the drawing board of this Japanese guy creating design fiction at Toyota. In agile sprints where designers and coders work together towards a shared vision. Or maybe the most important transformation could be the budding idea that you have been thinking about but haven’t yet been able to articulate and visualise?
Panu Korhonen is the Managing Director of Nordkapp.
