TU Delft Industrial Design students recently helped us with great new insights for our mobile air quality sensor casing and design. This week we kicked off with a team of master students from the University of Utrecht to help formulate our positioning statement, helping us approach large corporates more effectively. University of applied sciences Utrecht students are helping us discover algorithms to design mesh networks for low power tracking devices. Interns from the International Business Administration program of the Erasmus University Rotterdam are producing hands-on marketing and sales propositions so we can better position our products to business customers. At Saxion University and Saxion University Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences students are supporting the development of new water quality sensing techniques. Graduates from Wageningen University & Research are helping line up functionality for wildlife trackers. Employees with degrees from TU Delft lining up kinetic research and insights for our energy harvesters for devices on the move.
You may think we work with students because the university programs are fairly cheap or because we don’t want to pay top notch salaries at SODAQ. The real reason we love to work with students is for their open mind and un-smothered creativity. Often we have stared at technological challenges and usability or functionality issues for weeks and weeks only to discover that we are blindsided by our knowledge and expertise. We admit we are human. We tend to forget to always think customer centric. From start to the end. How will the end customer use our devices or solutions and what do we need to achieve in order to make this the best experience?
Students simply excel at this stuff. They have not yet been clouded by experience and assumptions. They are great in looking at challenges from different perspectives. They come up with creative solutions, time after time. We love what they do for us and hope we give them something in return. A glimpse of what a scale up tech company can do in a new exploding field of technology. Working with a team of young and older people with a business goal in mind and at the same time trying to improve the world a little bit by trying to limit the use of batteries. This is an oath to our students and interns. Thank you for working with us!
If you run a university program focused on cutting-edge IoT technology, research and development, we’d love to hear from you!