Smart Office Business Summit and Hackathon

October 01, 2019

Our first-ever hackathon aimed to make smart offices even smarter. . . and make some new friends while doing it!

Last week, Eindhoven was abuzz with the energy of co-creation—even more so than usual.
 

For three days, our HQ on the Eindhoven High Tech Campus played host to the Smart Office Business Summit and Hackathon 2019. The event's first day was dedicated to a Smart Office Business Summit, which included presentations from several companies who work in the same smart office sphere that we do. This was in service of getting to know all the players in the smart office space and reframe the competitive landscape as a partner ecosystem.

By learning about each other's opportunities and priorities, attendees were able to see where the overlap and synergies are, setting the table for the hackathon itself.
 

Hosting this event allowed Signify to showcase the flexibility and power of Interact, our suite of software applications and systems that bring connected lighting systems together with smart building, smart city, and other Internet of Things solutions.
 

Using the rich set of Interact APIs, ecosystem developers can build innovative, scalable, and integrated implementations on top of the Interact IoT platform.

By collaborating, everyone—companies and individuals—can use their own skills, innovations and unique “insider knowledge” to create products and services that truly interact with one another. In this way, we can elevate and expand what the words “smart office” mean.

As Maarten Pieters, Head of Co-Creation and People Insights, says, "We're bringing together different companies within that smart office ecosystem to create joint value propositions."

Perhaps from these condensed beginnings, some of the integrations will be taken to market. But regardless of the viability of those specific projects, new partnerships and alliances were formed. As was a general sense of increased possibility and greater collaboration among the players in attendance.
 

As Hannu Nousu, a participant from KONE, a smart technology company in Finland, remarked, “This hackathon had very good cooperation, and many things are opening up from other companies.”

And this is just the beginning. Co-creation works, and it's the wave of the future.