Prof. Pekka Abrahamsson talk

Yesterday, myself and Gabriela went down to the LERO building here at UL to attend a talk by Prof. Pekka Abrahamsson. Pekka is at VTT in Finland and his research interests are centred on business and innovation agility, agile software production and empirical software engineering. Among other things, he is currently involved in VTT's Agile Software Technologies Research Programme and the FLEXI-ITEA2 project.

His talk here at UL had two parts: first, the talk shared unpublished results of an Idea Movement study where 50 000 mobile service ideas were collected from people of all age groups in Finland; the second part of the talk connects innovation processes and software development through agile software development models.

Two interesting topics, handled by a good (as well as very funny) speaker! One of the interesting observations from the Idea Movement project, that at least I appreciated, was that it seems like innovation achieved through interaction with the actual users on a large (huge) scale isn't technology driven but rather "idea-driven", as 95% of the ideas they received were quite possible to achieve with current technology. As Pekka put it: "the ideas that came out were framed in current technology."

Brian Fitzgerald organized the talk. He has known Pekka for many years, but his cluster project 3 group also have current connections to VTT and Pekka, since one of the research fellows, Minna Pikkarainen, is from there.