Gewa Plus, the travel security app created from open innovation and the Applied vision
Gewa Plus is the application for monitoring and assisting employees while they are traveling to countries at risk. Gewa Plus combines profound skills in the field of travel security with technology capable of guiding the traveler in the most delicate situations.
Gewa Plus was created by Omega, a travel security company belonging to the Applied group, together with the Israeli startup Globekeeper, with the aim of providing a tool for monitoring and keeping travelers safe on territories characterized by the presence of some type of probable risk.
We asked Caterina Castellani, Applied Project Manager who saw the birth of the Gewa Plus project, to tell us about the genesis of this product, providing us with valuable insight into the "Applied" approach, not only to the world of travel security, but also to the world of open innovation.
As Caterina tells us, in 2019 Applied goes to Israel with the goal of finding initiatives with a strong innovative character in the world of cybersecurity.
Thanks to the collaboration with the Israeli Open Innovation Company SOSA, the first event in Israel is organized, where Applied exhibits a reverse pitch, i.e. the presentation of real business needs yet to be satisfied to a large group of startups and innovators.
After understanding the value proposition of the startups encountered, Applied analyzed the opportunities for integration and application of these technological solutions to serve concrete and real business needs, thus identifying the players to collaborate with.
Thus was born the partnership with Globekeeper. This startup has created a collaboration platform for law enforcement agencies involved in mission-critical contexts to increase the efficiency and organizational effectiveness of individual missions.
As Caterina explains, the ability to "apply" a technology such as Globekeeper's to a different industry, to a different need than the one it was created for, to a B2B paradigm instead of a public one, represented a very interesting exercise carried out by Applied and a concrete example of the scouting power and “value capture” capacity that we are able to develop thanks to our managerial and business intelligence. We have also demonstrated a capacity for concrete vision, in terms of the ability to understand the synergies that can be achieved between the technological know-how of Globekeeper and the industrial and design skills of Applied.
The result of this effort is therefore Gewa Plus, an application based on the Globekeeper monitoring infrastructure and integrated with the Omega’s expertise on traveler safety. This provides state-of-the-art functionality for business travel assistance.
Among the main features that make Gewa Plus unique we can highlight the possibility of creating 'risk zones' near the places of the business trip. These are areas that for various reasons (health, natural, social, political unrest ...) are at high risk for the traveler and therefore should be avoided. If the traveler were to enter these areas for some reason, thanks to Gewa Plus an alert would be immediately generated in the dashboard managed by the Omega assistance team, which would allow the user to be tracked in real time and with high precision. Furthermore, if the traveler were in danger, by pressing the screen of his smartphone for at least 5 seconds, he would be able to generate a panic alert at any time and therefore receive timely assistance from Omega (active 24/7).
The real and tangible impact of this solution on the life and safety of the traveler perfectly embodies the Applied vision towards the world of innovation, demonstrating an ability to apply highly innovative solutions to market opportunities not yet identified, thus increasing the value of technology itself and the creation of a new offer of products and services aimed at improving the management of companies and their people.