PWN Norway: Oslo Innovation Week

In our fourth year as an event organizer for Oslo Innovation Week, we aspired to accelerate the pace of change and show how disruptive technology can be used to create opportunity for a more balanced leadership. 

Our speakers for the evening were Aisha Bowe of STEMBoard, Yasmine Boudiaf of Serious Datum and Rob Baker, Global Client Director of Mercer and Co-President PWN Global. They delivered inspirational presentations that culminated in an opportunity for a panel debate, and even though the auditorium was large, there was a real sense of intimacy around the Q&A session that left everyone feeling uplifted and hopeful.

Yasmine shared with us her scientific approach and technical solution to seeing the corporate world though someone else’s eyes. She presented her work to us, showing how people can actually experience they way other people feel, and build empathy, when exposed to biased behaviours via a virtual reality headset and a selection of real life scenarios depicting these often unconscious behaviours. Her body of work is currently being rolled out and is having great impact in many corporate environments who are seeking to engender a more gender-balanced approach to leadership.

Aisha told us her inspirational ‘rags to riches’ story – from being raised in an ordinary working- class family with a wonderfully supportive father. Her father’s belief in her drove her to see what a capable student she was and how much she could achieve with the right support. Much of her success she attributes to then finding a great mentor she supported her whilst working in one of her most challenging career roles in NASA. In a traditional engineering environment, unaccepting and unbelieving of women and the capacity of women engineers, she hit her stride. Her story was a hugely motivational one, especially as she started by telling it the third person – an anecdote of an ordinary little girl with a sparkle in her eye and unfulfilled curiosity for life. As the story progressed, many of us guessed that Aisha was telling us her own story and the humility that she exuded was a lesson for all of humanity and presented a beacon for not only women, but anyone with a dream, to pursue it no matter which limitations others see. 

Rob Baker acted as compare for the evening, guiding us through the presentations and the panel discussion with our speakers, and panelists Brit-Agnes Sværi and Guy Maurice as well as our audience. 

A great night to remember and we look forward to making Oslo Innovation Week 2018 even bigger and more exciting.