Enter the roller coaster

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A blogpost by Ion Morozan and Marne van Wijk

The second week had a challenging start as the “Extremers” had to prepare their first presentation for their clients. We were so enthusiastic to deliver the best presentation to our clients that we actually forgot the time that passed. Coming up with at least 40 ideas wasn’t easy, nor was figuring out the structure and form of the presentation, but the feedback provided by our mentors given during the dry-runs we did gave us a good feeling of what the clients expect from us.

In order to help the client selecting most promising ideas from the 40, but also to leave the client something tangible, we all created booklets in which we gave a brief outline of the ideas. Most teams also added some kind of rating system that the client could use to judge the ideas.

After an interactive presentation and a discussion, our clients decided on the 10 ideas. The grading process was complex as we considered different criteria for scoring on the ideas. Even though there are different challenges we all had a common goal: innovation. Overall we were satisfied with our performance and so were our clients. The process continues with developing the 10 ideas and try improving them based on the feedback we received. The next big step will be bringing this 10 ideas down to the 3 most promising ones.

Another important event this week was meeting Gerard Smit, the Chief Technology Officer of IBM Benelux. He introduced us to the core research topics that IBM is working on. We were stunned to find out what IBM is working on. Gerard said that in 5 years from now “we will be able to touch through our phones and the computers will know what we like better than us”, pretty impressing, right?! He gave us a very enthusiastic and inspiring presentation which gave us insights on how we can think of innovative ways to use the them in our ideas.

An important aspect of working with a team on a project is giving feedback to each other. We ended our exciting second week with Asbjorn van der Vlis giving us an informative workshop on how to give effective feedback. He told us about different techniques that can be used and the importance of scheduling a weekly session dedicated on giving feedback. Each team had to come up with an outline of how they would shape such a meeting, and give a short presentation explaining it.

Overall, it was an intense but fun second week of the program. Our roller coaster ride has taken off!