Companies are always looking for an advantage and looking for ways to encourage their employees to innovate. One way to do this is by organizing an internal hackathon around a topic and having employees attack a problem together. Not only does it bring new ideas and new ways of solving problems for the company and its customers, but it also has the added benefit of allowing staff 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 help companies encourage their employees to solve big problems.
“Without a doubt, innovation and collaboration are the two key values when it comes to running internal hackathons, and almost everyone wants both,” Kessler told TechCrunch. He said generating new ideas was the number one priority when holding these events.
“Let's let everyone have some chance to come up with ideas and solve problems and be more efficient,” he said. “Today, in my opinion, innovation is synonymous with ai. Of the 1,200 hackathons we did last year, I think maybe 10 weren't 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 together in a room (or even virtually) and let them loose on a particular problem, good things usually happen. “Interdisciplinary participation, innovation, those ideas that come from people working with different stakeholders than usual, that's what hackathons produce,” she said.
Netta Retter, director of innovation programs at Okta, says she learned about the value of internal hackathons at her previous job at facebook and then carried that into her current role.
“I think something that facebook realized very early was the power of hackathons to really foster a culture of innovation very broadly in terms of influencing what was built and how it was built. And I think something that's really amazing about Okta is how they've really doubled down on that in our hacking culture as well,” Retter told TechCrunch.
This has manifested itself most recently in discovering ways to use ai to improve the products and services the company offers. Hackathons help bring together the company that works remotely to work on these problems.
“We've been able to build a really strong hacking culture globally, and I think diving into generative ai was one of the places where they were able to show how hackathons are a really powerful way to bring in new tools and give everyone the opportunity to use them.” They really influence what we build and how we build it from the bottom up, which I think is pretty amazing,” Retter said.
Chris Aidan, vice president of innovation and inclusive and emerging technologies at Estée Lauder, views these hackathons in a similar way, but because of their function, they tend to focus on topics of more human interest than those specific to the business, discussing things like ways to improve breast cancer screening or helping people with vision problems apply makeup without help. But the method remains the same, no matter what the goal is.
“We do one hackathon a year that involves both the public and employees, and then we do internal hackathons based on a challenge with a particular business unit or one of our brands that is trying to solve something,” Aiden said. They also hold brainstorming sessions, what he calls idea marathons, which involve creating a no-code or perhaps low-code solution.
Retter says that bringing together people in a wide range of roles, that is, technical and non-technical people, really helps bring new ideas to life. “I think having more diverse roles leads to better products and better innovation. And I think diversity in hackathons is really critical,” he said.
“It doesn't matter how technical people are or how amazing what you build is, unless you have diverse perspectives, different lived experiences, people pointing out different ways to use the things you're creating, it's pointless.” the same impact,” she said.
