DIGILE is launching a new strategic research programme, called Need for Speed (N4S). The programme will involve studying and developing business activity models, working methods and tools for a continually accelerating digital economy which is even becoming a real-time one. The objective is to give companies the means to speed up their operations: for example, to react more quickly to changes in customer requirements or market conditions, or significantly reduce the journey of the product or service from idea to sale.
F-Secure is working as the driver company of the programme.
“The Internet is the first technological platform in history which makes a fully global digital economy possible. One consequence of this is that digital goods are available to everyone immediately, at any time of the day or year. Companies have to be able to follow and manage their business in this way. The best gaming companies already do this. They are able to follow events in their game world in real time, pick up problems and react to them before the gamers go off somewhere else”, says the leader of the N4S programme, Janne Järvinen, who is in charge of F-Secure’s external research co-operation work.
“The objective of the N4S programme is to bring this kind of thinking and action model to all fields. My dream is that I would have a button on my desk, by pressing which I would get a few different variations on some product and get them into trial use globally, and after a few days I’d get an analysis of the customers’ reactions”, laughs Järvinen.
Finland is amongst the global leaders in rapid digital business. Many traditional industrial companies have updated their activity in this direction and the use of, for example, cloud services and other indispensable technologies is abundant when put into international comparison. In the N4S programme, the intention is to take the next leap in this development.
“The results of the programme will be both new tools and new operating models. Revamping operating models is of critical importance because the central question is how large companies can work in the ways demanded of them by a real-time economy, not just in what they say but also in practice”, says the Technology Director of DIGILE, Pauli Kuosmanen.
As with DIGILE’s other research programmes, the funding consists of the contributions of companies, universities and Tekes. The length of the programme is four years and it is DIGILE’s largest programme ever.