Why is it especially good to work together with start-ups in times of crisis?

Start-ups are much more flexible than large companies that have been on the market for a long time. This means that they can help companies adapt to the situation very quickly, especially in the event of a crisis.

My start-up stackOcean shows an example of this. We were asked by Kiel University of Applied Sciences if we could provide our survey platform https://voty.io for a master thesis that deals with how students cope with the spontaneously offered online teaching that was made necessary by Covid-19.

Four days after the first contact the survey was not only online — a new answer module was developed, tested and activated especially for this survey, which the platform voty.io had not had before. During the seven days that the survey was open, the requirements for the analysis of the data provided by the platform were permanently recorded and simultaneously included in the code of the platform. Examples of new developments during these seven days are a filter option for the responses received according to individual criteria or CSV export of these filtered data.

With the survey, well over 10000 answers were collected, including about 4000 sentences of free text answers. In order to avoid having to analyse all of these text data by human hands, we have developed a module in consultation with the university, which can automatically go through and analyse these data with the help of artificial intelligence. From the initial idea for developing an AI module to its results it only took one week.

We see this project as a huge success story for both sides. stackOcean has proven how quickly start-ups can react in times of crisis and what added value they can deliver with individual software adaptations. The Kiel University of Applied Sciences, on the other hand, has not only done a great job, as the survey revealed, in quickly coming up with and implementing a holistic concept for online teaching. It has also shown that it is always open to the use of new technologies with its desire to implement a module for data analysis with artificial intelligence.