As part of our commitment to the Seven C’s, Maven Wave kicked off its first annual Innovation Challenge in August 2021. This exciting initiative brought together eight cross-functional teams to compete against one another in a friendly bracket competition. The goal? To conceptualize and design a product that addresses a major industry pain point experienced by many of our clients.
The competition was stiff, and the heat was on. After 10 weeks of iterating, testing, and perfecting their solutions, the teams’ demos were put to a company-wide vote. Choosing between these remarkable solutions was a grueling task, but in the end, three teams emerged victorious.
Over the next several weeks, we’ll dive into each of the three solutions and get to know the brains behind them. But for now, here’s a quick rundown of each of the winning solutions.
Team Airwaves
One of the biggest challenges retailers face (from clothing stores to restaurants) is keeping costs low without sacrificing the quality of the product. For Team Airwaves, that made the prime directive simple: reducing the overhead associated with installing and maintaining hardware in the retail setting. The team’s solution demonstrates the ability for Edge hardware to securely authenticate with a backend control plane and deploy a Kubernetes cluster-running software. Rather than require an onsite technical professional to set up and install hardware and software, the hardware is a simple, plug-and-play solution.
Team Shore Thing
The guiding principle for Team Shore Thing is their shared belief that the current healthcare system is inefficient, which results in overwhelmed patients and unnecessary costs. From untangling complicated insurance plans to finding the right doctor, many factors cost patients time and money while increasing provider costs and reducing productivity.
The solution? Leveraging modern collaboration, data, and Artificial Intelligence / machine learning to match customer needs to providers’ services based on preferences, cost, and underlying conditions — and it’s all in a single, simple platform. Not only that, but the team’s solution helps providers and payers drive engagement network efficiencies and reduce total care costs through increased in-network care.
Team Riptide Masters
In this day and age, consumers expect shopping experiences that meet them wherever they are — whether they’re shopping online or in-store. And to complicate matters further, consumer preferences are changing faster than ever before. For Team Riptide Masters, they focused their efforts on a single mission statement: retailers must evolve their understanding of the customer’s journey to better serve them across all shopping platforms.
In response, the team developed a client-facing dashboard that provided enterprise-level customer insights that allow them to drill down into areas of interest. With this information, organizations can more easily make data-driven decisions based on customer needs.
Our three winners have produced some incredible work, and we can’t wait to show the world these innovations. If you’re interested in learning more about the teams’ solutions (and how they’ll impact businesses), keep an eye on the Maven Wave blog for the next post of the series!
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