Forem: Mario Alves

Have you met the new European strong innovator?

Mario Alves — Fri, 07 Aug 2020 09:31:42 +0000

Companies have been through a lot of challenges during the last months: from sending their employees to remote work, to change their production in order to adapt to the current needs or even to temporarily close their doors and lay off their workers. The ordinary days of 2019 seem like a distant reality now. While we are all asking God (or karma) for better days, European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) of 2020 was released – and even if it’s not the solution for our problems, it does bring us reasons to smile.

EIS is an annually report done by the European Commission which compares the research and innovative performance of the EU members, other European countries, and regional neighbors. The innovation performance of EU has been increasing at a steady peace since the 2012, with a performance lead over the USA (for the second time now), China, Brazil, Russia, South Africa, and India. With an indicator better than EU, only South Korea, Australia and Japan. This is the first year that the study does not include the UK as an EU member – but it had a small impact on the EU’s average innovation performance.

In order to compare the individual performance of each country – and help member states to focus their efforts on the areas they need the most, innovation performance is measured using several indicators, divided in 4 categories with several subcategories: Framework Conditions (Human Resources, Attractive Research Systems, and Innovation-friendly Environment); Investments (Finance and Support, and Firm Investments); Innovation Activities (Innovators, Linkages, and Intellectual Assets) and Impacts (Employment Impacts and Sales Impact). Considering those, member states are classified in four groups according to their average performance scores: Innovation Leaders are the group of countries with innovation performance well higher than the EU average; the second group, the Strong Innovators are the ones with innovation performance above or close to the EU average; the third group, the Moderate Innovators, covers the countries with this indicator below the EU average and finally, the Modest Innovators are the ones with innovation performance well below the EU average.

And here’s the strong innovator we want you to meet: Portugal! Previously a Moderate Innovator, this year Portugal joins Austria, Belgium, Estonia, France, Germany and Ireland. Luxembourg also changed group, from Strong Innovator, the country joins Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Sweden on Innovation Leaders.

The subcategories in which Portugal scores the best are Innovators, Innovation-friendly Environment and Attractive research systems. Within the subcategory Innovators, “Small and Medium Enterprises Innovation in-house” and “Small and Medium Enterprises with Product or Process Innovations” are the dimensions that stand up. As facilitators of open innovation challenges, we would like to believe that our work contributed to obtain such a good result to Portugal. If your company would like to become a strong innovator as well, but you don’t know how to start, we are very happy to introduce you to the benefits of open innovation and to guide you through the organization of a challenge, which can be exclusively for your company or opened to our enthusiastic tech community! Find more information about what we do and the projects we’ve done with companies, here.

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Tinder for Hackathon Teams

Mario Alves — Thu, 09 Apr 2020 18:13:53 +0000

For those of you who are Tinder users or just watchful to the tech news, you should know that the App is offering the option to match with anyone in the entire world, helping people to have virtual dates during this time of pandemic crisis.

Why is this relevant for Hackathons and other Innovation Challenges?

Imagine you’re participating at an online hackathon. How do you create your team? I bet you invite the same old gang from the university days, your colleagues at the office or your closest friends. This may work if you’re doing it for the kicks, but not if you want to take it to the next level and to do this in a recurrent way.

There’s a challenge that is perfect for you, but you’re missing that crucial team member or even the whole team. How do you do it? Do you just give up from participating?

What if you had a Tinder for Hackathons that could match you with the best Mobile App Developer available?

Hold that thought! Let me recall my last story “Coronavirus and other crises that force people to reinvent themselves”, regarding the subject:

A team composed of Japanese, French and Canadian participants that together collaborate to build a solution? This may seem like the beginning of an old joke, but it can actually be the reality of the future.

When I said “the future”, I didn’t mean less than a month, but what can I say? My team got excited with the idea and actually made it happen 😱

But we both know that this Matchmaking Magic takes time to perfect, so what can you do at the moment?

Right now, at the TAIKAI platform, you have 2 options to build the perfect team to create an amazing project for a challenge:

Create your project without a team and then create project positions you want to be filled (kinda like a job board of a company)
Go to the “Innovators” tab and look for those who are available, according to the skills you’re looking for (a tinder based on skills instead of looks) and invite them to your team.

Of course that at the moment, the right person has to be available for you to matchmake them with your project, which is obviously not perfect…

How could we take it to the next level?

From the Innovators specific data such as skills, experience and challenge history, we could do the matchmaking process in a more automated way, in which you would be suggested people to create a project with, adjusting to your needs as a team builder.

That would be possible by building Henry, our future Matchmaking Bot, that could build the perfect team for the challenge you’re facing.

Why Henry, the bot?

If you’re an Open Innovation fan, you know that Henry Chesbrough was the father of this concept and we’ve decided to do it as a homage for all the great work he has done (and still does) in this field. We hope he doesn’t sue us! 😅

How can you start using our Matchmaking engine?

At TAIKAI we have 2 ongoing initiatives in which you can start using this new feature:

“Game to Save the World”, the first TAIKAI Game Jam — https://taikai.network/gamejam
“Fight COVID-19 Open Challenge” by TAIKAI — https://taikai.network/covid19-challenge

Feel free to give us feedback or report bugs 🐞 you encounter!

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References and cool stuff you should look into:

“Innovation Imperatives from COVID-19” from Henry Chesbrough — https://www.forbes.com/sites/henrychesbrough/2020/03/18/innovation-imperatives-from-covid-19/#5238628f6fb1
“COVID-19 crisis will create the next Googles and Amazons” from Sifted —https://sifted.eu/articles/covid-19-new-google-amazon/

Developer! Are you looking for the freedom you will never have in your company?

Mario Alves — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 11:00:43 +0000

It’s a fact that software developers are in great demand these days, to say the least… The growing need for building more tech products vs. well-trained resources is out of balance.

There’s plenty of studies and articles explaining why that happens and that as the number of tech companies increases, we have X more job offerings every year for almost the same number of computer science students. But that’s not the point of this article!

If you’re a developer you already know this as you’re constantly being harassed with “come to the dark side” messages from nagging HR recruiters trying to lure you into changing your job.

So what are your criteria to evaluate if you should change your job?

Is getting higher pay, higher responsibility or just a change of scenery?

Well, what I’m about to tell you is beyond all of those reasons! If money or status is all you care about, then you should stop reading here as I’m not adding relevant information for your decision criteria…

1. Building a product from scratch

Yes, it is easier to do improvements on an existing product. It sure releases you from several headaches, but bear with me for a second: Imagine that you could build Twitter from scratch. Or GitHub? Can you imagine the feeling of belonging and the sentiment of calling a product a baby of your own? Let’s ignore the crying on their first months of life… 😅 Taking it into perspective it almost feels like magic and that anything is possible if you put your mind to it.

2. Being able to work with several technologies or areas of expertise

Working with a big company as a developer means you’ll have a very limited scope in what you do and the role you play within the company. Usually, you’re assigned to developing a specific feature or a component within a feature (featureception? 🧐) reporting to a manager that reports to another manager until the chain is completed. This may seem like it takes most of the responsibility out of you, but I’m sure that it will eventually make you bored or even hate your job. On the other hand, working in a small company (especially in a startup), having fewer resources to hire loads of people makes you have an important role in what the company develops. It will make you learn new things as emerging tech, owning a big chunk of the product development as well as articulating with other areas of the company, which will increase your skill set and make you a more valuable professional!

3. Working remote, flexible hours and a fun environment

It is a fact that big companies are trying to adapt to this new future of work environment in which you can work from home, enter and leave work when you please or simply have a table tennis game during lunch break. But changing a company’s culture (even if you’re improving it) is something that takes a while. In newborn companies (especially tech ones) that culture is already built-in: working remotely is an option, having to leave early to go to a doctor’s appointment or just to collect your kids from school, having lunches, beers, dinners, go surfing and other fun activities… More than that, you can be yourself and not afraid of that scary corporate boss that doesn’t like your yellow flipflops or your black hoodie. Working in a place where everybody works for passion and not as an obligation will make you want to wake up to go to work everyday!

4. Long term opportunities are enhanced or created

As a wise man said once “with great power, comes great responsibility”, Uncle Ben (or Voltaire if you’re old school). Responsibility of building a product or leading a whole department brings you invaluable experience that would be difficult for you to replicate outside of the startup ecosystem. So if you take a step back and visualize the whole picture, even if you get paid more now, working in a very narrow function and with the same tech stack every day for 10 years will bring you a lot less than being able to learn new tech, lead projects and build new products, in which you’ll have a faster learning curve and even if your startup tanks, your experience will be worth at least 3x more in the market.

5. Accepting that risk is everywhere, whether it is a big company or a small one

Failing is what makes us humans. And if you think that only startups fail, you’re wrong. Remember MySpace? What about Blockbuster or Kodak? All big companies that failed to innovate and eventually went bankrupt.

It is true that statistically, startups have a bigger tendency to fail as they’re building new products or services that may or may not have market fit. But sometimes, a big bank also goes kaput (remember Lehman Brothers?). Instead of running away from risk you should evaluate it and embrace it as part of your decision. If you truly believe in a company’s vision isn’t it riskier to stick with a company that you don’t like, even if it brings more financial stability? Risk is not only financial, but it is also a bunch of factors that you should consider, like emotional stability or happiness, for example.

6. You can make a difference in the company’s vision and culture

Last, but not least… Joining a small company is not just about creating a good product, learning faster or having more long term opportunities. When you’re in a company with less than 50 people YOU will make a difference. You can set the course of a company to success or failure, but assuming you’re in it to drive it to success you’re leaving your mark that eventually will last for a long time, even if you leave it. This is something that you won’t get anywhere, I’ll assure you that!

To sum it all up...

These are the reasons why choosing a startup over a big corp might change your life for good! Statistically, it will make you happier, train you to be a better professional and a better individual, and of course, if it all works out, it will make you get better pay in the long run!

Bonus Conclusion

This works for software developers as it works for any other field, such as business developers, marketers, even executive management! 😎

Our Culture

This is what we’re building at TAIKAI. Not only as a product but as a team. It may sound like a cliché, but I truly see my team as a family that is building a future together and that is reflected in our culture. Don’t trust my word for it! Ask anyone who’s in the team!

TL;DR:

The smaller the company the happier you’ll be!

Thank you for reading!
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