Seeing A Bright Future During Our Week at IPSW

We're always amazed by the quality of the talented youth that are coming out of our post-secondary institutions. Last week was no different as we were honoured to be part of Western Science's Industry Problem-Solving Week.

Of course, our team winning the whole shebang was a nice addition too!

First, a little overview of how the week progressed:

• I presented the problem statement to the team on Monday;
• The students, our development manager Yan Zhang, and I talked during the morning and had lunch on campus;
• The students then went off as a team to start working. We created a Slack account for them that day and were able to communicate with them remotely;
• Tuesday and Wednesday, they continued their work and came to the Echidna office for a tour and another lunch with Yan and me;
• They finished the report and presented it to all the business partners on Friday.

All the mentors and industry partners then judged the 10 submissions and Team Echidna won the event. The team received certificates from Dr. Burns Cheadle, the director of corporate relations and student professional development at Western.

I have to admit, we Echidnas were extremely impressed with the quality of our team. It wasn't just the quality of their research and work ethic, but also their presentation skills. I'm not exaggerating when I say could have seen them, the way they spoke and defended their solutions during a question-and-answer period, delivering to any of our customers -- and delivering effectively.

The challenge we brought them was related to our desire to continue to evolve our own products and explore relationships with those partners that deliver large-scale digital solutions, including cloud-service providers. We looked to them to give us their opinion on helping us position ourselves to clients to deliver solutions that rely on scale.

The experience gave us some new perspectives to consider how we expand our clients based on the foundation we've already developed, especially in key verticals. With the fast-changing nature of cloud computing and technology, we're exploring our own position within that environment and making sure we're part of that growth. And it's always great to have a fresh set of eyes on a project.

We love working with our partners in the post-secondary education field. After all, as we grow, we're going to do it through strong partnerships and benefitting from the depth of talent -- specifically Drupal talent -- in London. We're working to develop pathways to attract students from Western.

We look forward to more of these events in the future and continuing to partner with our colleagues at Western University and Fanshawe College to help support the next generation of talent that's going to power London's success!

Challenge: @DigitalEchidna to design a cloud-based + extensible healthcare services framework. Solution by #IPSW2017 student team #teamwork pic.twitter.com/ae3n4nayHG

— Western Science (@westernuScience) February 23, 2017