I’m thinking back to a post I did in December 2018 regarding an intended Hackathon. Now I’m sharing some deeper thoughts on Hackathons.
Interesting to review my what was on my mind – about the intent of running a Hackathon in 2019. It did not happen for some reasons and the main ones were the lack of expertise and the lack of culture. To address those things, I remember that my team and me started other initiatives to help building the culture in which stopping the “real work” was not a waste, but an investment, part of our routine and part of our strategy. We started the internal “Dev[evelopment] Community in Brazil” and a series of internal meetups to exchange ideas, practices, and solutions. Meanwhile I started benchmarking globally how to run a successful Hackathon – Göran Henrixon was my point of contact then – and we still running global Hacks together 😁😁!
Another thing I did was to get in touch with other Hackathon specialists and started getting into the backstage of the events they organized – by providing mentorship to the participants. At this point I have to thank Fernando Rych & Marcia Golfieri, who opened doors for me to get inside very interesting Hackathons happening in Brazil.
The first one was the BTP Hackathon (by Brasil Terminal Portuário, with great discussions with Carla Trindade and Fabiana Morgante) – a Hackathon to solve Brazilian Harbors problems.
There was also another Hackathon, which I have to thank Felipe Pires de Jesus who had the courage to go mentoring for the first time with me there at Locaweb, an Internet Services Provider.
After COVID came, we also enrolled in external digital Hackathons in 2020, hosted by Shawee to understand the feeling and the experience as a participant.
One of the projects we did ended up in the top 10 best out of dozens of ideas! 🏆🏆🏆 (Marcelo Dias Carmo, Douglas Higa, Niudo Freitas, Fellipe Bonilha Zoadelli)
We felt ready. All those small actions led to running my first Hackathon in 2020. After three events, now I share my second set of Thoughts about a Hackathon. 💭💭
Hopefully it serves as a reference to my future-self and to anyone interested in running an innovation event in their working context.
Dissecting a Hackathon – Thoughts II
1- The benefits of a hackathon ❤
Hackathons are great events designed to help curious people (both students and professionals in general) to experiment, try out new things and come up with all kinds of great innovations. Even though they tend to generate digital solutions, they are not targeted towards IT professionals only. I ran 3 hackathons over the past few years – all of them with the support of a fantastic team (to name a few Denis Donato, Fellipe Bonilha, Alzira Duarte, Ricardo Kano, Juliana Gomes, Marcel Guerrero, Julia Mariano, Gustavo Alvarenga, Marilene Luna) , and these were great marathons, each with its own different theme and ideas. The main focus for a hackathon is to find solutions, and the limited amount of time does bring in that sense of innovation, while considering any of the speed that might arise. ⏳🧠☕
2- Testing your skills 💻
Hackathons are great because they test your skills under pressure. You always want to test where your skills are at that given moment and understand whether you can improve them. Thankfully, a hackathon will bring you those results in a creative way, and it will make it easy to convey exceptional results. A hackathon is also designed to be exciting, while harnessing the true power of your creativity in a very exciting and engaging manner.
3- Better collaboration 👥
Another advantage brought by a hackathon, based on my experience, is the fact that you get to boost collaboration between team members. A lot of people tend to get in their silos, so entrenched in their routines, that may lose the ability to have broader perspective, to communicate or to build great connections. Excellent programming skills are not enough. A hackathon encourages collaboration, since you can’t do everything on your own and you have to work together with others in order to bring that idea to fruition. Which is great, since it helps you push the limits, and eventually come up with a breakthrough idea.
You also get awesome people ready to work into making the event the best possible one. You need to have people who can handle uncertainty and that do not get hopeless in face of complex challenges. At Scania Group/Scania Latin America I can’t forget to mention ainda praise great mentors, sponsors & jurys we had along the way (Auro Brito, Sandra Leite, Danilo Pístola, Ana Carolina Barbosa Silva, Wesley Toppani, Raphael Boni, Veridiane Maman, Larissa Holden, @Felipe Teixeira, Cesar Augusto Stahlschmidt,Danilo Pístola, Davi Almeida, Joyce Yoshikawa, Thiago, Rafael Fernandes, Tatiane Hipólito, Fillipe Souza, Fabio Silva, Armando Corrêa, Fábio Patucci, Guilherme Miranda, Elias Abissamra, Patricia Acioli, Adolpho Bastos, Fabricio Babler).
4- Uncovering new talent 🧠
If you’re a business owner, or scouting to build a team of highly motivated, creative people, creating a hackathon is one of the best ways to uncover new talent. Not only do you get to find talented professionals that can work with you, but maybe you might even find the missing link, that person whose skills were indeed needed within your business. Plus, you can also check and see the power skills of every person attending the hackathon, and that can help quite a bit if you want to hire some of them.
5- It’s worth the investment – diverse ideas & teams bring a greater potential return 💰
It costs if you want to perform a Hackathon. But don’t look for that number alone. 💲💲💲
One suggestion for you, when building the business case, is to show to stakeholders the cost per hour of ideating with an expert company compared with the cost per participant hour that your event will carry. If you are building your case to promote a Hackathon, I recommend estimating that 60% of people will actually go from beginning to end.
Remember: Don’t promisse return on investment when selling a Hackathon idea. It may not happen. Try to create other hypotheses for your Hackathon to show that it will be a successful event, for example:
- I believe this Hackathon will have up to 135 subscribed participants through an good marketing campaign;
- I believe 4 ideas will be incubated in the first quarter of next year;
Your Hackathon is a product by itself, so setting up OKRs or other metrics associated with that product that go beyond the financial aspects is a great way to sell it without commiting with unknown factors, such as the quality of the ideas that will come.
Still, make your event as diverse (in terms of people background and skills) as possible, to bring external perspective and the cost per hour can become a potential bet for bringing a greater return on investment.
With that perspective in mind, creating a hackathon is not that expensive, and it does provide amazing opportunities, being very cost-effective and a LOT OF FUN! You get to find exceptional talent, and it also makes it easy for those talents to assess their knowledge and put their expertise to the test in a creative manner. Try to reuse available infrastructure and equipment, as long as they give to the participants what they need to succeed.
6- There’s a potential for a breakthrough 🤯
While this is not a guarantee, the reality is that hackathons are very competitive, so depending on the topic it might be possible for one of the teams to come up with a breakthrough. It’s great and it really shows how beneficial a hackathon can be, regardless of the theme and other details.
But, don’t let the ideas die. Make sure they havethe proper attention in the upcoming months so that those ideas can become more and more disruptive. Nurture them and make sure to get executive support. As the chart below shows, you start with an Incremental approach for innovation whilst increasing the chances for radical or disruptive innovations.
7- Create a great experience and momentum for participating teams
Hackathons can motivate team members to push their limits and come up with great solutions. As mentioned earlier, a hackathon is more than just a simple technology or coding event: it helps bring some brilliant ideas together, and that on its own can be very helpful. Plus, many companies either create or scout hackathons in an effort to find talent, so attending a hackathon might even get some people hired if they are great at what they do.
Provide a good experience to the participants. Give them knowledge back, entertain them. It will be a stressful period for people, so making them remember that moment will be key for people to participate again and again.
Conclusion
Creating a hackathon is great for any business that wants to create a culture of networking and co-creation while developing & finding new talent. At the same time, hackathons also challenge people to test and even improve their skills and become more multi-shaped.
There are many unknown elements, especially in the beginning, but doing that right and pushing the limits at the highest level is certainly a thing to take into consideration. That’s why creating a hackathon is a great idea, and even if I ran 3 of them, this is just the beginning!
I’m open for a chat on this topic! So feel free to reach out!
References
https://digitalleadership.com/blog/types-of-innovation/
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7008709624807747585/
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6545417962818424832/