Why is it important to be data-driven?

AI and machine learning will lead the digital disruption, whether we like it or not. Chasing operational efficiency by following conventional strategies is a dead-end.

By 2020, AI technologies will be a top-five investment priority for more than 30% of CIOs. And if you wish to enjoy optimal returns on that investment and deciding where to start, you must realize that it requires a lot more than a fancy report or a few developers in an internal innovation lab.

To begin, you need to understand what you are getting – and what you are getting into – if you and your company are to be successful with AI. Only then can you orient your organization’s thinking and practices towards exploiting AI’s capabilities.

Your team needs to learn how to think differently. They must be focused and deep, yet active across multiple disciplines. Technology is the business today, but you can’t “just” buy it. You need to change your mindset, acquire the right technical and creative skills, empower your teams to execute, use data, and implement advanced technology solutions “bottom-up”, with speed, efficiency, and joy.

Design your data-driven business today with the technologies and mindset of tomorrow – an exciting fusion of applied AI, deep tech, new-age business models and art!

The design-driven data thinking process

Our multidisciplinary team of smart and creative minds combine design, data, and deep-tech to help you create value for your business and boost innovation.

The workshop program

We work with business and technology teams to adopt the data-driven approach. Learn from our experienced team, practice data and design thinking, gain insights from advanced technologies and return to your office with prototypes that can impact your business immediately!

The workshop is a joint effort by Edenspiekermann and Firmshift.

Why it’s different from anything else you’ve seen

• Design-driven: fast, visual, result-oriented
• Data-driven: specific, scalable, unbiased, validated
• Technologically and scientifically deep, yet fun and understandable
• Anti-disciplinary and provocative: see what happens wehen Scientists, Designers, Engineers and Business professionals contribute simultaneously

What does the program look like?

It's not just about hand-outs – this workshop is fully hands-on. We use structured brainstorming techniques to visualize and discuss the potential of your data and what is required to put this data into action.

During these two intensive days, we'll upgrade you with the skills and knowledge of tomorrow:

Day 1

• Become aware
• Spot your business problems and opportunities
• Change the conventional engineering mindset
• Determine what’s unique
• Understand the existing data
• Develop hypotheses

Day 2

• Test hypotheses
• Design tech solutions and machine-learning based models
• Measure
• Evaluate and validate
• Summarize and re-check original assumptions

After these 2 days we can help you with:

• Develop and deploy for testing
• Experiment, validate and scale

Who are these smart and creative minds?

We combine different brains to get you to a next level: scientists, designers and technologists.

Our hosts:

• Igor Mikhalev, MBA, PhD Researcher, Data Scientist, Co-Founder
• Dr. Sebastian Kortmann, Professor of Strategy and Innovation at UvA

Our UX and design thinking experts:

• Joost holthuis, Creative Director, Partner at Edenspiekermann
• Boyd Emmen, Interaction Designer at Edenspiekermann
• Jeroen Pluim, Managing Director at Edenspiekermann, Entrepreneur

Our science & technology experts:

• Dr. Alexey Lukashin, Data Engineer, Co-Founder, Associate Professor
• Alexey Zubritskiy, Senior Software Engineer, Architect
• Konstantin Sokolov, NLP and Machine-Leaning Scientist

Who would benefit from this training?

This workshop is perfectly suited for business and technology teams who are ready to re-train their thinking with a focus on innovation and growth. We've been empowering teams for years.

Concepts and techniques we'll be using

These are the concepts and techniques we'll be using to sketch new-age business technology architectures during workshops (don't worry if you’re not familiar with any of these now):

AI

• Data science platform - Dataiku
• Deep learning frameworks – Tensorflow, Theano
• NLP and NLU
• Unsupervised learning for clustering and anomaly detection
• Supervised learning for prediction cases

Business

Here we are applying a blend of frameworks and insights to explore and understand how we are transitioning from competing on buying commodity tech to competing on being able to transform our organizations to embrace ever-growing complexities and become capable of consistently delivering smart and creative technology solutions.

UX and design

• Human-centered design and radical innovation
• Design thinking for idea conversion in an ambidextrous organization
• Applied imagination: Principles and procedures of creative problem-solving
• Visualization in service design
• User journey mapping
• Emotional experience design and prototyping

Software engineering

• Rapid prototyping for UI
• Python
• Java, Scala
• Microservices

Infrastructure

• AWS PaaS
• Hashicorp Terraform and Consul
• Docker
• IaC (infrastructure as Code)
• Puppet, Chef
• Own supercomputing infrastructure