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Hackathons

How to create effective problem statements for idea challenges and hackathons

Problem statements are concise descriptions of an issue that help understand the problems better and come up with effective solutions. They are like navigational compasses – the direction north being your desired outcome. Whether you are conducting an idea challenge, an internal hackathon (hackathon for your employees) or a full-fledged innovation campaign, the problem statement is key in determining the success.

Why do you need a problem statement?

You need a problem statement so that users don’t solve wrong problems or those that do not exist and end up with pointless innovations that have nothing to do with your business. Case in point: Juicero, a $400 wifi-enabled, over-engineered, pointless machine for fresh juices. No wonder the project was scrapped. But bear in mind that this company raised $120 million in funding from multiple venture capital firms including Google Ventures. No matter how big you are, it is easy to overlook the two most basic questions,

Are we solving the right problem?
Is the problem worth solving?

What is the role of a problem statement?

The role of a problem statement is to clearly indicate the current state of issue, the desired outcome, and the existing gap. Here is a good example, in his recent blog, Richard Branson talks about the global cooling prize that aims to develop a climate friendly residential cooling solution. He does a brilliant job of explaining the problem, the necessity for a solution, and the gap between the current state and the desired outcome.

As our planet warms, we need it more than ever to keep our people cool. Worldwide, by 2030, extreme heat could lead to a $2 trillion loss in labor productivity.

Despite a 100-year runway, the most advanced residential air conditioners have only achieved 14 percent of their maximum theoretical efficiency. Commercial LED lighting has achieved nearly 70 percent of maximum theoretical efficiency. Solar panels have reached 40 percent. I’m no AC expert, but 14 percent seems pathetic.

How to create an effective problem statement

In order to simplify the process and narrow down the problem statement, we suggest defining an overarching theme, followed by a specific problem statement and a set of rules specific to the idea challenge or hackathon.

Define the theme
Define the problem statement
Define the rules

Define the theme

The theme of innovation could be a specific technology, specific business problem or market trend/opportunity.

Here are a few a questions that can help you decide the theme:

What is the major technology that could impact your business in the next 5 years?
What is your most pressing business issue?
What are the emerging trends you would like to capitalize on?

KONE, one of the largest elevator manufacturers in the world, wanted to capitalize on the growing $125 billion modern elevator market. The company identified smart elevators, safety and security, and energy efficiency as the major drivers, and hence chose them as the themes of its hackathon.

Define the problem statement

The problem statement specifies the particular issue/ problem.The problem statement has to be specific and provide as much context as possible. Here is a brilliant example from the invention platform, Quirky.

Here, the theme of innovation is wireless technology, and the company has clearly outlined the status quo, limitations, and some inspirational ideas to get started with. This context will provide the foundation for the participants to build on.

One of the crucial things that we have witnessed which impacts the success of an internal hackathon is the problem statement/theme and its relevance to business objectives/problems.

It is important to provide as much context and additional information as possible to help participants come up with innovative, relevant, and feasible ideas.

Here is a mock theme and problem statement.

Note: This problem statement has been framed for a fictitious internal hackathon for IKEA, Australia. However, the context provided is based on real press releases that outline the vision, strategy, and business objectives mentioned by IKEA, Australia.

	Example 1	Example 2	Example 3
Innovation theme	Evoke positive emotions in customers and enhance customer satisfaction	Improve delivery service of IKEA	Address the children’s market ( 3 to 12 years)
Context	As mentioned by Jan Gardberg, “IKEA is in the business of Emotions. It’s about feelings and emotions; that is the most important part.” IKEA, Australia, tops customer satisfaction survey.	“We will make IKEA accessible to more people through our parcel service for Central West NSW,” Mr Donath said. The cost for the parcel service, small IKEA items, is $9. The parcel service is for products that fit the criteria of 14kg with a maximum size of 1.2m x 80cm x 60cm.	Rob Young, IKEA Australia Childrens’ Range Expert, said that the collections were designed to drive conversation around the importance of protecting our wildlife, particularly endangered species. IKEA has launched new kid’s collections, DJUNGELSKOG & URSKOG.
Problem Statement	Create in-store touchpoints that would delight the customer and enhance the way the consumer experiences IKEA products.	Create solutions to minimize the item returns and parcel service charges.	Come up with more product ideas made of sustainable and renewable resources to educate and inspire young kids.

Narrowing down the problem

Here is a simple tried and tested method of “NESTED WHYs and HOWs” to identify the underlying problem. Here is an illustration of using a series of WHYs and HOWs to craft the problem statement.GE’s mission was to develop innovative and affordable healthcare solutions and the company decided to crowdsource solutions for the same.

GE: Provide high-quality, affordable technology to the people in rural areas

Why?

GE: There is a lack of quality and speed of healthcare delivery

Why?

GE: Unavailability of qualified and experienced healthcare providers in rural areas and new graduates with very little experience in Primary Healthcare Centers (PHCs) in India.

How are you planning to solve this?

GE: By providing contextual training to the doctors at Primary Healthcare Centres

How?

GE: Develop a contextual learning protocol that will allow the care-providers to learn from the patients they treat.

Here you have it.

The Problem Statement: Develop a contextual learning protocol that will allow the care providers to learn from the patients they treat.

Define rules/ eligibility

Rules or the eligibility criteria are the constraints laid out by organizers to keep the scope of innovation focused on business, minimize irrelevant ideas, and maintain the standard of submissions.

Lego Ideas allow users to submit new product ideas. Although anyone can submit ideas, the company has well-defined eligibility and evaluation criteria.

For an idea to be selected, it should garner a total of 10,000 votes; 1,000 votes in the first six months, 5,000 in the next, and reach 10,000 in the next six months.

It also restricted the following to ensure submissions are feasible and meet the expected standard.

Content made using new part molds is not allowed.
IP owned by competing toy companies is restricted.
Ideas based on third-party licenses already being produced by Lego are not allowed.
Content matter that is objectionable such as alcohol, drugs, religious references, etc is not allowed.

Conclusion

Providing a clear, concise, and powerful problem statement would help you garner high quality, diverse, and relevant ideas, and help maximize the odds of success of your campaign. Here is the summary of things to bear in mind while crafting the problem statement.

Current status
Pain point
Desired state
Background of the issue
Contextual details
Opportunity
Accurate supporting data

Hackathons

Are hackathons good, bad, or overrated?

From Pope Francis to the President’s office, hackathons seem to be the flavor of the day. Over 80% of Fortune 100 and 60% of Fortune 500 companies have hosted or sponsored a hackathon. With rising popularity come criticisms and misconceptions. Having closely witnessed 300+ hackathons and multiple formats (public, corporate-sponsored, University, Internal and Non-profit hackathons) over a period of two years, one thing is absolutely clear.

Hackathon is a very powerful tool for innovation, IF DONE RIGHT.

However, there are some misbeliefs and unrealistic expectations.

Corporates exploit developers

The most common criticism is that the corporates outsource their work—the participant being unpaid labor and hackathons being exploitative in nature.

Hackathons are purely driven by passionate developers/ participants. The spirit in which people participate in hackathons is no different from voluntary contributions to open source. It originates from the desire to learn, experiment, solve complex problems, contribute, and build cool stuff.

For such developers, hackathons provide the best platform to showcase their skills, connect with their peers, seek mentorship from the industry experts and get recognized.

Case in point: The recent Tesla hackathon, which aims to solve the two major problematic bottlenecks in the robots. Tesla’s aim here is not to outsource work to unpaid labor. It is to crowdsource innovative solutions for its pressing problems.

What about the developers? Are they being exploited?

If you have the opportunity to work on cutting-edge technology for one of the world’s leading firms transforming the face of the automobile industry and take a shot at solving its most pressing issue in 48 hours, it’s more upside than downside for you. A participant has a lot to gain for the time and effort he or she invests.

Apart from the monetary rewards which only goes to a small percentage of the participants, the real benefit for these developers is often intangible. As one of the participants of the recent International Women’s Hackathon 2018 puts it:

We tried to develop an app that helps answer Google forms through voice ‘Hear me Out’. Although we were not able to build a webapp which was what we had initially thought, just a prototype of a desktop app but the process of sitting together with coming up with an idea and coding was fun. In between the fun we learnt through errors and via helping each other and taking help of seniors and peers. Coding together with chips, maggi, coffee and friends in my room from evening to night and night to morning before the submission was enlightening and enjoyable.

– Disha Agarwal, Participant, Internation Women’s Hackathon

Stack Overflow surveyed 25,000+ developers worldwide to find out why they participated in hackathons.

Source: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/

Who owns the hackathon IPs?

In over 95% of the hackathons, the IPs belong to the participants. Although a majority of the companies still do not claim IP rights for the products created at a hackathon, there are still a few companies that do.

**But we advise participants to carefully read the T&C before signing up. Companies should ensure they communicate anything that is likely to be different from the usual T&C for such events.

Here is the T&C of a recent hackathon hosted by Intel.

Participants owning the ideas/IPs created at the hackathons and companies opting to buy the best ones is, however, a practice that is mutually beneficial and welcomed.

Here is another variation of the T&C for a hackathon hosted by Procter & Gamble.

Employees are obligated to participate in internal hackathons

Companies try to squeeze out innovation out of employees by conducting hackathons and employees are often obligated to participate.

Companies often struggle to come up with ways to engage with their employees in a more meaningful way. Ask any HR Manager or People Director; it is impossible to come up with an activity that pleases every employee.

A hackathon is one particular engagement that hits the sweet spot and many use internal hackathons as a tool for driving employee engagement and fostering a culture of innovation.

Hackathon-a perfect employee engagement tool

Hackathon is one of the very few activities that combine the four essential components of employee engagement. An employee engagement initiative should allow the employees to tap into their passion, enable them to make meaningful contributions to the company, offer recognition, and be engaging.

There could be instances where employees participate out of peer pressure and obligation. But this is not a hackathon-specific issue. Peer pressure at the workplace is common across companies. It is important that companies ensure hackathon participation is voluntary. Constraints might help innovation but not peer pressure and feeling obliged.

Innovations rarely come out of hackathons

The innovations hardly last beyond the hackathon. GroupMe and Skype are rare occurrences and exemptions.

The aim of the hackathon is not to create a blockbuster product, conjure groundbreaking innovations, or build a multi-million company in 48 hours. If that is the expectation, then it is clearly wrong.

The objective of a hackathon is to provide an avenue for experimenting ideas, exploring opportunities, and attempting to solve problems. If a company can spot interesting concepts, promising ideas, and creative solutions, it will further go through an extensive and rigorous process of evaluation, testing, and development before it can be rolled out.

A hackathon is a tool to seed the culture of innovation and meritocracy. It abides by the principle that good ideas can come from anywhere. It is just the starting process of the long and lengthy process of innovation filled with uncertainty. This infographic will give you an idea about the role of hackathons in the process of innovation.

Role of hackathon in the process of innovation

Not an effective recruiting tool

Unlike hiring challenges, a hackathon is not a recruitment tool and should not be used as one. Yes, sometimes companies do spot extraordinary talent and end up absorbing them. But it is just a byproduct and not a regular occurrence.

Neither feasible nor inventive

Hackathon projects are neither feasible nor inventive.

This is a common problem faced by hackathon hosts. The quality of the output does not always meet the expectation. However, over time, we found out that a few common factors affect the success of the hackathons.

Defining problem/goal
Providing the right contextual knowledge
Marketing to the right audience
Guidance and mentorship
Setting the expectations right

Conclusion

There is no perfect tool for innovation. Every process, activity, and framework has its own merits and demerits. It is important to address the drawbacks. Without participants, a hackathon is futile. Hence, it is important to ensure the participants enjoy and gain value out of hackathons.

Overall, a hackathon is a very powerful tool for innovation, IF DONE RIGHT.

Hackathons

Why and when do you need a hackathon management software

In 2018, HackerEarth conducted over 400 hackathons. This included hackathons for enterprises, governments, non-profits, and educational institutions. Companies spent approximately $1.2 million on hackathons for different objectives. For instance, using HackerEarth’s innovation management software, GE Healthcare crowdsourced ideas and prototypes through hackathons, Amazon conducted Alexa hackathon to increase product adoption, HCL for marketing and branding, Societe Generale for hiring data scientists, and plenty of other companies for driving internal innovation.

Download the complete Hi-res Infographic

These organizations chose HackerEarth for three reasons:

Availability of robust hackathon management software
Presence of a vibrant 2.5million+ global developer community
Expertise in hackathon-driven innovation

In this post, we will discuss the necessity of a hackathon management software. To be specific,

Do you need software to manage hackathons?
If so, when and why do you need a hackathon software?
What are the features to look for in a hackathon management software?

If you are here, it is safe to assume that you are planning to organize a hackathon. So here are a few questions that will help you decide if you need a hackathon software.

How big is the hackathon?

If you are planning to engage hundreds or thousands of people, then you should be prepared to handle a high volume of ideas and projects. The process of registration and judging also become increasingly difficult with more participants. If it is an internal company-wide hackathon, with employees participating from multiple locations, you need a robust platform to manage all communications and submissions. As a rule of thumb, if you have more than 50 people participating in your hackathon, you will need a software.

Is it an online or multi-phased hackathon?

Online hackathons give you a wider reach. But you will need a platform that supports ideas and prototype submissions. Specifically, you will need a file upload portal that supports a variety of formats that automatically opens and closes during the specified duration.

You can read more about the various types of hackathons here.online, offline, and two-phase hackathons

Is there an ideation phase?

If you are planning to include an ideation phase or run only an ideathon, then the role of a hackathon software becomes imminent. When it comes to ideation, the real challenge lies in combing through thousands of ideas, ensuring every single idea is evaluated efficiently and making sure the best ideas rise to the top.

A hackathon management software makes this task very simple. It helps assign multiple judges, set the evaluation parameters, and in the end, every idea is accounted for, with an option for feedback, if at all you want to validate the ideas manually. If you prefer automatic evaluation, you will need a sophisticated algorithm based on a solid crowdsourcing framework that gives visibility to the top ideas. Here is a glimpse of what a hackathon management software can do.

Assign multiple judges
Assign scores and ratings to ideas
Create a real-time leaderboard
Enable peer voting
Enable public voting
Provide real-time suggestions and feedback to improve ideas

One of the biggest challenges you may face is clubbing similar ideas. For example, during a sustainable development hackathon for a global energy company, we received more than 3,500+ ideas. A lot ideas were based on similar concepts and solving similar problems. For instance, there were more than 25 ideas that were based on decentralized energy production and consumption.

Thankfully, our software was able to club these ideas using Natural Language Processing (NLP). This feature of the hackathon software allows you to automatically read through the submissions and club together similar ideas under one common hashtag.

Are you running a Machine learning (ML) hackathon?

If you are running a Machine learning or a data science hackathon/challenge, the hackathon management software is a must-have. The highlight of the software is the auto evaluate feature. Here is how the process works.

Users build the model and submit their predictions on the test data sets.
User predictions are compared with original test cases, and based on the evaluation metrics, the score is generated.
Users can make multiple submissions, enabling them to continuously improve the model.

If you were to do it manually, it would take at least 15 minutes to evaluate a single submission. To give you an idea of the time saved, in our latest Machine learning hackathon conducted for Societe Generale, we had 5,500+ participants and over 2,500 submissions. If done manually, Societe Generale would need 625 hours/26 days just to evaluate the submissions.

Must-have features in a hackathon management software

When opting for a hackathon management software, ensure it has the following features:

Single sign-on & user restriction

If you are conducting an internal hackathon, then single sign-on (SSO) is the basic feature that the hackathon management software must have. It enables domain-based restriction for the participant.

If a company called ABC is hosting a hackathon, then only employees of the company with ABC.com domain can participate.

The user can also be restricted on the basis of “invite-only.” This avoids people registering for the hackathon by forwarding the registration link. This also allows to conduct business unit or geography specific campaigns.

Third Party Integration

Most organizations use Slack, Yammer, Teams, Flock or some form of collaboration/communication tool. Integrating the hackathon software makes it easier for the employees to participate, submit ideas, and engage.

Data Security

Data security is one of the primary concerns of many top companies. The best option for companies concerned with data security is to handle everything on their own servers. Your hackathon management software should provide the option of hosting hackathons on the company’s server as well as a private cloud.

Good-to-have features in a hackathon management software

Here are some good-to-have features in a hackathon management software that would make your life easier.

Customizing the hackathon flow: Having the flexibility to customize the flow, i.e., the number of phases, allows you to customize campaigns specific to your requirements.

Example: Ideation followed by judging followed by onsite hackathon.

Multiple campaigns: Running multiple campaigns across different BUs or locations helps in scaling the event.

Cloning a campaign: Replicating successful campaigns becomes easier and saves a lot of time.
Archiving a campaign: Allows you to re-visit campaigns and create a pipeline of ideas.

Conclusion

If a hackathon is your preferred tool for sustained and continuous innovation, then hackathon management software will definitely help in scaling the efforts and streamlining the process, while maintaining the consistency and making your tasks 100 folds easier. In conclusion, you will need a hackathon management software if the following list of 6 areas is of your concern.

Scale
Effective Idea management
Cross-functional collaboration
Data Security
Consistency
Ease of use

Hackathons

The role of hackathons in the process of innovation

Hackathons have become increasingly popular over the years. On a superficial level, a hackathon is still seen as a one-off annual event or a PR stunt. According to the 2017 Global hackathon report, more than 50% of hackathons conducted worldwide are recurring events.

Companies such as Facebook and Cognizant use hackathons as tools for sustained innovation. Even smaller companies with a shoestring budget for innovation find hackathons as a safe and promising bet.

Process of Innovation

Broadly speaking, innovation is the process of commercializing new and innovative ideas. Let’s take a typical innovation process, for example.

Process of innovation

The first step of the process is discovery. Discovery is the act of choosing your area of focus for innovation. It can be emerging trends, a big market insight that has the potential to disrupt the market or even a game-changing technology.

Once the area of focus is finalized, then you need to choose how can you exploit the opportunity. In other words, you figure out what can be done in this space that would offer the opportunity growth. And you need to consider all possible ideas. And this where the second stage of the innovation process, ideation, comes in. Rather than depending on a few ideas, you open it up to a larger group internally or externally.

The next step of the innovation process would be execution, where the ideas are evaluated and the best ones are shortlisted. This is followed by the development of a prototype, followed by a feasibility study and if all goes well, you roll it out to the market.

Role of hackathons in the innovation process

The challenge lies in executing every step of the innovation process efficiently and connecting them in a coherent manner.

With hackathons, you can take the market insights you have identified, translate it into themes and problem statements and open it up for ideation followed by the development of prototypes.

For instance, KONE, one of the world’s largest elevator manufacturers, wanted to capitalize on the expected $37 billion market growth. It conducted a hackathon with the identified market drivers as themes such as smart elevators, security, and energy efficiency. It opened the challenge to the developer community around the globe and ended up with working prototypes in a span of few weeks.

The infographic below clearly shows how valuable a hackathon can be in the process of innovation.

The role of a hackathon in the process of innovation

The role of a hackathon in the process of innovation

What makes a hackathon a valuable innovation tool

What makes a hackathon unique is that it is the only tool that enables the creation of minimum viable products or prototypes from ideas. There is no other innovation activity that covers roughly 70% of the process.

Hackathons are swift. The entire process of creating a hackathon, marketing the event, driving registrations, ideating, and creating prototypes typically takes 30 to 40 days. At the end of the event, you are left with working prototypes. An innovation program cannot get more agile than this.

The diversity of ideas is another important factor. When you open up a problem to a global audience, you are bound to receive a diverse set of ideas which wouldn’t be possible with traditional innovation models.

Overall, a hackathon is a consummate tool for sustained innovation. Regular events yield better results than one-off hackathons. If treated as an innovation program and crafted meticulously and executed efficiently, it is the most cost effective innovation tool.

[Ebook] How to conduct your first hackathon. Download now.

Hackathons

6 reasons: Why companies conduct hackathons

Over 80% of the Fortune 100 companies conduct hackathons.

There are over 1000+ hackathons conducted every year around the world and 48.5% of them are conducted by private companies. Yet, hackathon is still an underutilized tool when it comes to corporate innovation.

Source: Global Hackathon Report.

When asked what a hackathon is, the common definition you get is something along these lines.

“It is an event where a bunch of programmers come together to collaborate and code on a project lasting several days, typically 48 hours.”

While it is true in the literal sense, it is like saying,

“People paying $1000 to live in the middle of a desert for a couple of days and finally burning a wooden effigy while trying to adhere to some principles is what Burning Man is about.”

There is more to hackathons than meets the eye, especially from a company’s perspective. So why exactly do companies conduct hackathons and what do they aim to get out of it?

Here are 6 different reasons why companies conduct hackathons.

Crowdsourcing ideas and solutions for your business

Let us break this down a bit.

When to conduct crowdsourcing hackathons

When you have identified the problem and don’t have a well-defined solution or when you have a major insight or idea but do not have a full-fledged vision of the product, crowdsourcing is your best bet.

Let’s take blockchain, for example. It is an emerging technology and there is no denying that it is going to change the landscape of transactions as we know it. The applications range from digital identity to distributed cloud storage to cryptocurrency. However, the complete potential of blockchain is not yet realized. It is still anybody’s game to win.

Traditionally, a company would assign the responsibility of exploring this technology and the task of coming up with a killer product to a handful of people, their R&D division/Innovation departments that work in silos.

The problem here is by the time the R&D team comes up with a workable prototype or two, there could be five other similar products in the market.

Not convinced yet?

The famous and “anonymous” Satoshi Nakamoto conceptualized Blockchain in the year 2008. In the 9 years since there have been over 900 cryptocurrencies in the market and four major players.

IBM and Microsoft are two companies that leverage hackathons in this space. IBM launched Hyperledger Fabric Version 1.0 and Microsoft unveiled its open-source blockchain framework Coco. But beforethis, both these companies conducted or sponsored many blockchain hackathons, including the world’s biggest event— the Dutch blockchain hackathon.

Although innovation is still thekey responsibility of R&D/ Innovation departments, the hackathon approach enables the entire organization to embrace innovation. With this approach, the team primarily responsible for innovation works with the entire organization to synthesize ideas, proof of concepts, and, finally, take the shortlisted ideas for development under its wing.

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Why crowdsourcing hackathons

Shorten the innovation cycle
Get a diverse set of quality ideas
Incur lesser costs compared to traditional innovation models
Move ideas to prototypes in just a few days

Download the complete step by step guide to organizing a successful hackathon

Increasing API adoption

An API can be used for a number of purposes, from driving innovation to developing a new line of business. Here is a snapshot of different ways APIs are used.

Source: KPIs for APIs

Whatever the purpose of your API, its success depends on one crucial factor – ADOPTION. Here is the flowchart depicting the API adoption.

6 reasons: why companies conduct hackathons - Drive API adoption

Source: KPIs for APIs

The more the active developers, the more the quality applications we can expect. More active users lead to more API calls, which could then translate into revenue.In other words, you need to get your product (API) to developers and get them to use it (say, use it to build great applications).

So, how do you acquire more quality developers and activate them? Here is a typical developer acquisition funnel.

6 reasons why companies conduct hackathons: API activation funnel

Source: KPIs for APIs

Just like you would market any other product, there are plenty of ways, such as developing SDKs, posting on GitHub, and answering developer queries, to market an API. You should be carrying out a number of these activities in parallel and an API hackathon should be on the top of your list.

Even companies with a billion API calls still conduct hackathons. For instance, to celebrate its 10-year anniversary, Google Maps took a cross-country road trip from San Francisco to New York to meet developers and creators who are building the map of today.

Here is a pretty cool video of one of their hackathon pit stops during the road trip.

Why conduct API hackathons?

A well-marketed and well-executed hackathon can get you easily 1500 developers and 3000+ for big names such as IBM, Google, etc.

Here is an interesting case study of how Flock drove API adoption using hackathons.

Flock is a collaboration tool. It is a lesser-known alternative to Slack and Microsoft Team. Flock found that vendors have been trying to layer collaboration tools on top of platforms that were designed for individual users.To facilitate that, Flock recently launched its API known as FlockOS for developers to build apps and bots using Java and node.js software development kits (SDKs).

To drive API adoption, Flock decided to organize a series of 9 hackathons over a course of 12 months. Each hackathon is hosted with a specific theme and problem statement in different cities.

So far Flock has completed 3 of the 9 hackathons. With these 3 hackathons, Flock was able to acquire 3600+ developers and build 70+ new applications. A scale of this kind of acquisition is not possible through any other approach.And, you can get anywhere between 20 and 40 decent applications. All this is done over a course of just 4 weeks.

In short, an API hackathon:

Gives you maximum air time to pitch your API to the developers
Gives you the opportunity to put your product (API) in the hands of passionate developers and get them to use it
Gets valuable feedback from the developers to improve your product

Drive innovation internally

Hackathons are one of the best ways to drive innovation internally by engaging with your employees. It provides a platform for your employees to collaborate with other business functions and showcase their talent.

In an interview with New York Times, CEO of Shutterstock, Jon Oringer explains the significance of internal hackathons for his company:

“We have hackathons, which are pretty fun. A lot of people get really excited about them, and they can build whatever they want for the company — it could be crazy, practical, whatever. We actually wind up implementing a lot of those things throughout the year. It pushes a lot of thinking. It’s pretty amazing what people can get done in 24 hours. Sometimes we talk about a new product feature and it can take three months to build. Then someone will prototype it overnight.”

And no topic about hackathons is complete without the Facebook hackathons. When it comes to using these events to drive innovation and employee engagement internally, there are not many companies who can do it better than Facebook.

Facebook organizes one hackathon per quarter and has done 50 major hackathons and 80+ small events around the world.

Many of the Facebook products created at the hackathons end up being rolled out to customers or they become internal tools within weeks. The Like button, Timeline, and Chat were all created at FB’s internal hackathons. Talk about sustained innovation!

Read more about Facebook’s internal hackathons.

Putting your data to better use

It is estimated that by 2020 we will have produced 40 zettabytes of data. To put this in perspective, that’s 5.2 Terabytes of data for every person on this planet.But as of now, only 0.5% of this data is being analyzed and used by companies.

One of the recent emerging trends is Big Data/Machine Learning hackathons. Over 6% of the hackathons conducted worldwide are Big Data/ML hackathons.

Global Hackathon Report: Domain specific hackathons

Source: Global hackathon Report

A lot of companies are opening up their data sets to developers to build effective predictive models. Especially, BFSI companies, which produce massive amounts of data every day, use this data to gain insights and better understand their customers by building predictive models.

Societe Generale, the French multinational bank, built predictive models from its data by conducting a Machine Learning hackathon, which saw over 1800+ developers and data scientists participate.

Not just banks, Exotel, a cloud-based telephony platform, is one of Southeast Asia’s largest companies. With over 1300 customers, Exotel powers more than 3 million customer conversations every day and has processed 1.2 billion calls in the past 5 years.

For Exotel, emotion detection from audio was an unsolved problem. The company decided to conduct a Machine Learning hackathon. It provided developers with large volumes of voice samples to decipher the sentiment.

In just 18 days, the company got some impressive models, built by 2000+ developers using ML and Natural language processing (NLP), which could detect emotion from audio and flags conversations based on sentiments, such as, happiness, sadness, anger, etc.

Community creation

If you are wondering what a powerful developer community can do for your business, listen to what Eric Migicovsky, Pebble’s founder, and CEO, says.

“Our developer community rivals any of the competition since we came from the community itself, with over 27,000 developers building apps and watchfaces for Pebble. We’ve demonstrated that even a small group of committed individuals can launch an entirely new computing platform from scratch.”

Hackathons can be a great tool to create brand advocates from a developer community. Once you successfully host or sponsor hackathons, you build a community of developers who are a simple marketing channel that is cost effective; these developers/designers/thinkers help in ideation for the future, review of beta products, and creation of revenue or brand awareness by API adoption.

“Developers engage in community in an effort to discover tools, exchange knowledge, and solve problems,” said Sarah Jane Morris, former Developer Community Manager at Mashery (Intel).

Putting together a vibrant hacker community is easy with these innovation-focused events that provide amazing networking opportunities. Remember to keep them engaged. It is nothing but some give and take!

Employer branding and Identifying tech talent

An employer branding hackathon is a highly targeted branding activity. It allows a company to let potential employees know what the company stands for, the challenging projects it works on and communicates its values to them.

For instance, say your company uses a Django/ Python framework. By conducting a targeted hackathon for Django and Python developers, you will be able to let the developer community know about your company and the technology stack you use. It also allows companies to build a talent pipeline.

Another case would be companies conducting women-only hackathons to attract female talent by positioning themselves as an attractive brand to the female workforce.

Hackathon, a tool for sustained innovation

Novelty + Commercialization = Innovation

Hackathon is the only tool that covers 70% of the innovation journey. It starts with discovery, idea generation, and ends with idea conceptualization.

6 reasons why companies cinduct hackathons: role of hackathons in innovation

And best of all, it is cost-effective and can be done on a regular basis to create a culture of sustained innovation. The stronger the insight and problem statement, the better the outcome of the hackathon.

Hackathon is to innovation what 3D printing is to manufacturing.

It allows you to rapidly prototype an idea, determine the quality of the idea, spot flaws, reiterate, scale it, and roll it out to the masses.

Hackathons

Global Hackathon Report

Research shows that almost 60 percent of the companies expect to kiss goodbye to more than 20 percent of their revenues within five years because of disruptive innovation. Unless they change the way they operate, that is.

Understanding that a bleak future lies ahead unless they obey the innovation imperative, organizations world over are trying to align innovation and business strategy, take up open innovation, and “out-innovate” their competitors. Innovation entails identifying challenges, ideating to find solutions, implementing the most promising ones, and managing the process to sustain the winning outcomes.

Hackathons, which are a quick route for idea generation, have been surging in popularity for various reasons in recent years. A hackathon is defined as an event where teams of experts and advisers come together to collaboratively build and launch new ideas. No longer are they confined to the IT sector. More than the lure of awards, participants are excited by the chance to learn and the collaborate, be recognized by peers, enable social change, and network extensively.

With focused intensity, hackathons aim to spur innovation through various creativity initiatives and sustain the successful outcomes via careful management practices. Hackathons are much more than prototyping exercises—they are fun, engaging events that can help companies from becoming disruptors and not disruptees. Conducting a hackathon is often thought of as “starting up within a corporation.”

Being in the business of hackathons, we knew that a detailed analysis of global events would bring questions and insights that would indisputably help in strategic decision making across sectors and geographies.

We analyzed nearly 1000 hackathons across 75 countries in the world during a two-year period (from 2015 onward) and put together a Global Hackathon Report. Overall, we discern a common trend—hackathons everywhere are helping organizations battle talent scarcity, acquisition, and retention while fueling innovation across domains and functions.

From ideation to execution, we see hackathons upending traditional business models and rewiring the competitive landscape. In this report, we discuss the hackathon format and culture and its exciting possibilities to help people adapt to the future.

The list of countries and cities where most hackathons were conducted has some surprising names emerging as incubators of innovation and new businesses. It is time global companies and governments take notice of these new ecosystems with their talented citizens and creativity-focused organizations. These areas can be certainly earmarked for growth and future investment.

Governments and NPOs fall behind private firms in terms of the number of hackathons hosted. Corporates have been harvesting the benefits of hackfests—employee engagement, recruitment, branding, API adoption, innovation, beta testing—for a while now, and the interest hasn’t petered out yet. Still, we notice that open hackathons with more non-developers than ever before are catching on as a reliable means to drive social change. With so many hackathons coming back year after year, it wouldn’t be presumptuous to claim that hackathons are certainly living up to their potential.

Creating gender-inclusive environments doesn’t seem to be happening at the pace one would hope for. Unfortunately, this seems to be true in the case of hackathons as well, with women-only events being just too few to be considered significant. In a time where diversity and inclusion are key goals for any agency, this finding only reinforces the fact that hackathons continue to be male-dominated.

Predictably, universities and high schools prefer to attract students to hackathons for the immense learning on offer. In the report, you’ll see that the most popular rewards for the winners are rarely cash prizes.

Over the years, the power of hackathons has been cleverly leveraged in other industries, aside from IT. Intensive collaboration in a short period of time to arrive at novel solutions seems to be working for the financial, communication, media, high-tech, and automotive industries equally well. From our data, we could conclude that hackathons are being increasingly conducted to accelerate the pace of digital transformation.

Hackathons are clearly helping companies go from idea to action. To know what hackathons are, how these problem-solving exercises are being used to create an impact, and why people are turning to external partners and platforms to navigate the mercurial landscape of innovation, download our full report.

Vivek Siva

Insights & Stories by Vivek Siva

How to create effective problem statements for idea challenges and hackathons

Why do you need a problem statement?

What is the role of a problem statement?

How to create an effective problem statement

Define the theme

Define the problem statement

Narrowing down the problem

Define rules/ eligibility

Conclusion

Are hackathons good, bad, or overrated?

Corporates exploit developers

What about the developers? Are they being exploited?

Who owns the hackathon IPs?

Employees are obligated to participate in internal hackathons

Innovations rarely come out of hackathons

Not an effective recruiting tool

Neither feasible nor inventive

Conclusion

Why and when do you need a hackathon management software

How big is the hackathon?

Is it an online or multi-phased hackathon?

Is there an ideation phase?

Are you running a Machine learning (ML) hackathon?

Must-have features in a hackathon management software

Single sign-on & user restriction

Third Party Integration

Data Security

Good-to-have features in a hackathon management software

Conclusion

The role of hackathons in the process of innovation

Process of Innovation

Role of hackathons in the innovation process

What makes a hackathon a valuable innovation tool

[Ebook] How to conduct your first hackathon. Download now.

6 reasons: Why companies conduct hackathons

Crowdsourcing ideas and solutions for your business

When to conduct crowdsourcing hackathons

Why crowdsourcing hackathons

Increasing API adoption

Why conduct API hackathons?

Drive innovation internally

Putting your data to better use

Community creation

Employer branding and Identifying tech talent

Hackathon, a tool for sustained innovation

Global Hackathon Report

Download the complete Global Hackathon Report here