At the beginning of this year Yeoh Siew Hoon, producer of the WIT Conference, and I had a conversation about why the industry is long on talk and short on real innovation. We both agreed that we needed fresh eyes on the challenges within the travel sector, but not entirely naïve or unknowing. Thus was born the WIT Developer & Designer Challenge as part of WIT Bootcamp, which will be held on October 21.
Start-up pitches and hackathons are common. In my opinion they are usually self serving in some form or another. I have seen some good ones and some bad. What I feel is missing is that we talk about innovation as if its a goal in its own right.
Most of the innovation in recent years has been incremental. Some have been sector changing. I count Zipcar and AirBnb as good examples of this. One took the legal route and fought hard to win – then sold to Avis for half a billion dollars. The other is valued much higher yet consistently breaks multiple laws.
Travel has a dark underbelly where there are many problems that need solving. Some of these solutions, which people present as answers, are interesting. The solutions? Sadly far too many. – some are structural, some are opportunistic, some are retreads, and some are just screen tweaks –
What we wish to see in this first year of the WIT Challenge, which we hope will become a regular feature of the WIT Conference, is the participants take on some of the industry problems from different perspectives. And judging by the current group of entrants we are starting to get what we want.
Thus far, we have entries from counties as far away as in Europe. We have had an industry vet, a video team, a group of students, some technical, some conceptual, and some just design based.
The problems they are tackling are big ones. And that is what WIT is really all about. Perhaps one year we should call it “No Fear!’
So if you still have that BURNING idea – send it along. The WIT team has agreed to keep the Challenge open till October 14. Bring us your hard problems
You can enter here.
