A group of Aalto students to improve service experience in the public sector

Aalto University organises a multidisciplinary course in cooperation with the Finnish Tax Administration, the Population Register Centre, HUS and Accenture in spring 2016. The course was kicked off on 12 January at Urban Mill in Otaniemi in an event in which the organisations’ challenges were introduced with help of presentations and service design exercises.

‘We want to further Finland’s digital leap in cooperation with Aalto University by solving practical problems and at the same time educating new specialists,’ says Mika Rossi, Director at Accenture.

The aim of the course that has been built around the intensive Hackathon event is to speed up the digitalisation of public services in Finland. The number of agencies joining the project rose to three when HUS also registered. HUS participates in the course with as many as three of its organisations, which are the Children’s Hospital, the Medical Imaging Center and the hospital’s development unit.

‘We became so enthusiastic about the idea that we wanted to involve everyone,’ says Managing Director of the HUS Medical Imaging Centre Jyrki Putkonen summarising his own thoughts and those of his colleagues.

The customer organisations gave presentations of their challenges in the kick-off hoping the student teams would find solutions to them. Despite the time pressure, the students produced high-quality results.

‘All concepts generated were creative and practical. We could go and start implementing each of them tomorrow, Head of Development Mika Pulkkinen from the Finnish Tax Administration summarises the outcome of the evening.

The organisations challenge the students to develop solutions to make it easier to use the organisations’ services and to increase the use of mobile services. HUS’s challenges were related to the development of ecosystems, service concepts, technologies and crowdsourcing.  
 

Student teams extremely cross-disciplinary and international
 

This group of more than 80 Aalto University students is expected to develop creative and customer-oriented solutions that can be adopted quickly. Because the students represented 30 different majors it was possible to form extremely cross-disciplinary teams. About one half of the students are foreign so the atmosphere is very international.

‘This is a promising project. I’m looking forward to the actual Hackathon with great interest, Roope Kolu, a student of Design, described his feelings at the end of the kick-off.

The School of Business has been building the Hackathon concept in cooperation with trainers from Accenture and Fjord.

‘It is great to see how students exploit this concept and create something new. We speed up the change in the public sector together,’ Professor of Practice at Aalto University Katariina Kemppainen summarises. In addition to Kemppainen, the other members of staff from Aalto University involved in the implementation of the course are Teaching Development Specialist Christa Uusi-Rauva, Senior University Lecturer Johanna Bragge and Professor of Practice Esko Penttinen.

The Hackathon event will take place at the end of January; the best team will be presented with an award in May

The actual Hackathon event will be organised on 28–30 January at Urban Mill. The teams will then have 24 hours to develop solutions to the organisations’ challenges. After that they engage in implementing their ideas in practice with the customer organisation, and will pitch their ideas to the jury in April. The awards will be presented at Valtio Expo on 17 May 2016.

Further information:
Project website: https://nordic-events.accenture.com/hackathon/#/  

Follow the Twitter conversation and join it: #pshack16

Aalto University:
Seppo Laukkanen
Associate Vice President 
+358 50 568 8296
seppo.laukkanen@aalto.fi

Katariina Kemppainen
Professor of Practice
+358 50 486 9858
katariina.kemppainen@aalto.fi

Accenture:
Rita Mustonen
Projektipäällikkö
040 772 5715
rita.mustonen@accenture.com