This is the first time that an airline, an airport and a technology provider are involved in the Hackathon, which is held in connection with Slush, the start-up event which connects entrepreneurs and tech talent with top-tier international investors, executives and the media.
The Hackathon is an open innovation event where teams of five have 48 hours to develop new ideas and digital innovations based on open data and system interfaces (APIs).
"Our goal is to develop totally new services for air travel, which utilise personalisation and positioning, for example."
The team that creates the best user experience will be declared the winners, with the prospect of further developing their idea with the support from Finavia, Finnair and Reaktor Ventures. Around 500 developers are expected to take part with over one hundred joining the Air Travel track.
"For Finavia and Helsinki Airport to be successful in the international competition, it is important that the airport experience is excellent. Our goal is to develop totally new services for air travel, which utilise personalisation and positioning, for example. Attending the unique hackathon shows the forerunner attitude we are known by", says Heikki Koski, Helsinki Airport's Vice President at Finavia.
"Finnair and Helsinki Airport have largely common customers, and we believe this is an excellent opportunity to combine our data from our customer interfaces to innovate new services for the various stages of air travelling," says Jouni Oksanen, Finnair's Vice President of Digital.
"Reaktor is a great advocate of opening up industries to talented creators from outside said industries. It makes these ecosystems prone to innovations that may have seemed otherwise impossible, or too obvious to be successes. In air travel, we have found two very strong allies in Finnair and Finavia ‒ who believe in the power of service design and rapid prototyping as much as we do. This industry needs more of that,” says Fernando Leon, an evangelist for Reaktor.aero.
The "Future of Travel" hackathon will be held on November 6-8 at Suvilahti in Helsinki.
Finavia’s Helsinki Airport and Finnair are main partners of Slush, which takes place on November 11-12. Reaktor is key partner of Slush.
