Companies are always looking for an edge and ways to encourage their employees to innovate. One way to do this is to run an internal hackathon around a theme and have employees attack a problem together. This not only brings new ideas and new ways to solve problems for the company and its customers, but also has the added benefit of enabling employees to collaborate and share ideas.
Brandon Kessler, CEO and co-founder of DevPost, a company that helps clients organize and manage internal and external hackathons, says he’s seen how hackathons can help companies encourage their employees to solve big problems. helps.
“Without question, innovation and collaboration are two core values when it comes to running internal hackathons, and almost everyone wants both,” Kessler told TechCrunch. He said that coming up with new ideas is the first priority while running these events.
“Let’s everyone have some agency to come up with ideas and solve problems, become more efficient,” he said. “These days, innovation has become synonymous with AI in my view. Of the 1,200 hackathons we did last year, I think maybe 10 were not about AI. I’ve never seen anything like what I’ve seen with the rise of AI hackathons.
When you get a group of people in a room (or virtually) and leave them to a particular problem, good things usually happen. “Inter-discipline partnerships, innovation, ideas that come from people working with different stakeholders than your usual stakeholders, that’s what hackathons generate,” he said.
Netta Reiter, director of innovation programs at Okta, says she learned about the value of internal hackathons at her previous job at Facebook, then took it into her current role.
“I think what Facebook realized very early on was the power of hackathons to really foster a culture of innovation, to influence what was built and how it was built. In relation to. And I think what’s really amazing about Okta is that they’ve really doubled down on our hack culture,” Reiter told TechCrunch.
This has recently manifested in exploring ways to use AI to improve the products and services the company offers. Hackathons help bring together remote-first companies to work on these problems.
“We’ve been able to build a really strong hack culture globally, and I think really diving into generative AI was one of the places where they were able to show how hackathons can really open up new tools.” A powerful way to bring and give everyone the opportunity to use them. They really influence what we make and how we make it like from the bottom up, which I think is pretty amazing,” Reiter said.
Chris Eden, vice president of innovation and inclusion and emerging technologies at Estée Lauder, sees these hackathons in a similar way, but because of his role, he focuses on more human-interest topics rather than topics specific to business, like Ways to improve breast cancer detection by seeing things, or ways to help visually impaired people apply makeup without assistance. But the method is still the same, no matter the goal.
“We do one hackathon a year where both the public and employees participate, and then we do an internal hackathon based on a particular business unit or challenge with one of our brands that is trying to solve something ,” Aiden said. They also do brainstorming sessions, they call Idea-a-thons, which involve creating no-code or perhaps low-code solutions.
Retter says that bringing together people in a variety of roles, i.e. technical and non-technical people, really helps bring new ideas to life. “I think having more diverse roles leads to better products, better innovation. And I think diversity is really important at hackathons,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter how technical people are or how amazing the thing you’re building is, unless you have diverse perspectives, different life experiences, people who have different ways of using these things. Pointing out, those whom you are making, it is not so. Same effect,” she said.
why-companies-are-turning-to-internal-hackathons-techcrunch
