Pavel Kandalintsev, Deputy Sales and Distribution Director for Retail During the three-day competition organized at the premises of the Centre for Innovations "Playground", four-member teams will compete in creating innovative software solutions for our petrol station concept development in order to make the stations even more attractive to customers. As many as 40 competitors are taking part in the event, with the award fund for the three best solutions totalling EUR 5,000. The winners of the hackathon will be selected by a committee comprising eight members - six from NIS and one from ICT Hub and 30Hills each. In addition to providing its financial support, for the entire duration of the hackathon, NIS has also ensured mentoring assistance of IT, marketing and business experts and also good conditions for the competitors - modern equipment, inspiring space, fast internet connection and rest rooms. The hackathon will last for 48 hours straight, until 4 March 2018, when the winning teams will be presented, and in addition to monetary awards, the best developed ideas and innovative solutions could also win support in their future development and commercial application. At the start of the event, the competitors heard the speeches of the representatives of NIS Olivera Vujnović, IT Director, Pavel Kandalintsev, Deputy Sales and Distribution Director for Retail, Marija Halar, Director of Sales and Distribution Marketing Department, and Snežana Đurović, Director of IT Sector, who explained, from the perspective of the Company, the main guidelines of NIS petrol station business operation and the most significant solutions applied so far, and also presented NIS IT architecture. ICT Hub representative Dušan Vukanović explained the rules of the competition to the participants. Olivera Vujnović, NIS IT Director Olivera Vujnović, NIS IT Director, welcomed the competitors. "NIS invests a lot in new technologies, both in the area of technological processes and in IT. For us, this really is a special event since this is the first time that NIS as a large corporation is working directly with the IT startup community. The topic we set today for the competitors is very important to us, it has to do with petrol stations and we named it petrol station hacking. Our Company's slogan is "Future at Work" and what we have here tonight really is future at work and I hope that this weekend we will come up with a definition of a future petrol station. I am convinced that the best ideas will become NIS reality". Dušan Vukanović, the ICT Hub representative During the presentation of the hackathon topics, Dušan Vukanović, the ICT Hub representative, said: "The reason why we are here tonight is to support corporations. To support large corporations so that they may simply try to find, in cooperation with technological startups, innovative talents, IT professionals and entrepreneurs, their own business models that are changing very fast. We established cooperation with NIS four months ago, but this is simply the largest event so far. It is great that over 50 teams applied to participate in the hackathon, which means that for every team present here there were four more teams we unfortunately could not accept, which again speaks volumes about the interest generated when a large corporation opens up towards the startup community and innovative people". The competition, organized in cooperation with the Centre for Development of Technological Entrepreneurship and Innovations, represents the first step that NIS has taken in opening up towards the startup community and approaching technological startups as part of the Company's digital transformation.
