The Faculty of Engineering, University of Indonesia (FTUI) once again organized the Technopreneur Spark event to provide its students with entrepreneurship education/workshops based on technology. This time, the theme was Design Thinking, and Smartfren Telecom was invited back to deliver the workshop, which was held on Tuesday (28/05) in the Smart Meeting Room, FTUI Dean Building.
Dr. Muhamad Sahlan, Head of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Unit at FTUI, stated in his opening remarks, “I would like to thank Mr. Dani, Mrs. Linda, and Mr. Arnold for their willingness to fill this event. We have designed this event to be held monthly with different themes. After the Technopreneur Spark series, we will continue with the Technopreneurship Coach series. We hope this event can continue and produce the talents we expect, namely young entrepreneurs at FTUI.”
“The collaboration between the Faculty of Engineering, University of Indonesia, and Smartfren Telecom in this year’s Technopreneur Spark event is an important step in enriching our students’ learning experiences. We hope this event can produce young Indonesian entrepreneurs to achieve our 2045 goal of a Golden Indonesia,” said Prof. Dr. Ir. Heri Hermansyah, S.T., M.Eng., IPU, Dean of FTUI.
The first speaker for today’s workshop was Dr. Dani Akhyar, S.T., M.Si., Head of Corporate Communications & CSR at Smartfren Telecom, who also presented at Technopreneur Spark last April. His presentation was interactive, with Dani asking participants various questions about entrepreneurship and providing related advice. Topics included designing a start-up, discussing business ideas, problem-solving and solution thinking, creative thinking in innovation, and design thinking, which was the main theme of this workshop.
“One initial tip for design thinking is to be familiar with problems. Therefore, look for problems, not avoid them. That way, we can find solutions to those problems,” Dani said in his presentation.
The next material was presented by Arnold Sigisa, Head of People at Nuri Global. Arnold shared his experience in founding Nuri Global, a joint venture with Smartfren in e-commerce. Its flagship product is NuriCashback, a shopping application that allows users to earn cashback and additional income of up to millions of rupiah when shopping for products through the e-commerce platform.
“The Design Thinking process fosters creativity, innovation, and user-centeredness, helping you generate actionable solutions that are desirable for users, viable for business, and technologically feasible,” Arnold said.
In the following session, Arnold divided the participants into several groups for a discussion he called a Hackathon. Each group was tasked with identifying problems within the NuriCashback application and providing solutions. Each group then presented their solutions, and a winner was chosen from among them.
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Public Communication Office
Faculty of Engineering, University of Indonesia
