Can Hackathons be the next game changers?
Innovation is an important agenda in today’s global competitive environment. Companies which invest continuously and consciously in their innovation, tend to survive and adapt better than sloth organizations who treat innovation as another buzz word in their age old dictionary.
The world is changing rapidly, and so changing are the ways technologies are being used for multitude of purposes. Enterprises across the world are adopting unconventional ways to remain technologically updated. Crowd-sourcing and open innovation have become a new norm
The Innovator’s Dilemma
Historically, the world has seen the growth of companies which applied good management, decision making and resource allocation principles. Ironically, the very strengths of these companies became the cause of their demise, when they rejected disruptive technologies, listening to customers, tracking competitor’s actions carefully, and investing resources in design to build high performance organizations. It is often that industry leaders fail to seize the opportunities related to innovation and new technologies.
Also, companies are known to be reluctant to invest in innovations because of tight budgets,finance heads looking for rapid returns on investment, combined with lack of vision and inability of employees to adjust to the innovative climate.
Hackathons as it would be described further have the potential to address the innovator’s dilemma in a couple of ways. Let’s explore them
Hackathons as we know them
Hackathons are basically a shared space where individuals or teams of professionals collaborate and compete in a healthy manner to create innovative products and services in the form of web applications or new functionalities on top of existing applications . Hackathons are also about inventing new business ideas or discovering a whole new approach or dimension for technology problems and setbacks.
New Dimensions
There used to be days where only big names used to conduct their own hackathons to churn out the best ideas by inviting professionals to solve their business or technology problems.Their reputation used to be the prime motivation behind achieving enormousness and scale . Nevertheless, scaling up remained a dream for young enterprises and startups.
There are platforms which provide conducting hackathons as a service or solution for different set of requirements.
Few of the top platforms which offer their services for hackathons are→HackerEarth, Mettl, Agorize, TopCoder, Techgig and CodeChef
Hackathons not only remained a medium to generate innovative ideas, but also, they have become a key to address various aspects of innovation challenges, such as,
- Hiring
- Branding
- Promotions
- Time and Cost Savings
- Internal Engagements
- Innovation management
Innovation Management
Hackathons can be a great way to source ideas quickly. Generally hackathons are organized for short periods; and the time span ranges from a day to one week. Typically, new innovative ideas could take up around 6 months to a year in the generation phase consuming a significant amount of resources and special allocations. With a hackathon, firms can expect several working prototypes after the hackathon ends and then they can go on with the best ones.
Moreover, hackathons can be used for creating a whole new idea or to provide an innovative solution for a given problem. The areas in which hackathons can be utilized to garner innovation are also limitless. This means almost any business function of digital organizations or startups can benefit by organizing hackathons, along with the plethora of industry types they can serve.
In fact,companies these days are adopting hackathon to foster research and innovation, creating something like hack culture in their backyards. It is quite common to see employees of fortune 500 companies regularly involving themselves into hackathons of various sorts.
One Such example is Paypal, which conducted Battlehack in 14 different cities of the world and invited developers to create an app within 24 hours for pet donations.
Recently, CodeChef had organized an API hackathon where it exposed its API for the developer community to generate and build innovative solutions using CodeChef’s API. The hackathon observed a participation of 2000+ teams and generations of 50+ ideas, which could take a long time to think.
Get the right talent on board
Though we now understand how valuable hackathons could be for a firm’s success and failures. It’s not the only reason to love them. Hackathons could be an excellent place to catch the right talent at the right place and at the right time. Always, hackathons would provide you with the perfect and possibly the most engaged people for your company, who would share all your shift of gears, failures and fears, laughter and tears, bulls and bears, and still manage to stick around. In short, sense of commitment, intent of productivity and lust for creativity would be very high
Time vs Cost
No matter what, generating an idea is not as simple as it seems. Moreover, it could consume critical resources such as time, and R&D expenditure until you get the best ideas for your business requirements. With resource crunch and stressed restrictions, your innovation projects might undershoot your delivery expectations.
By organizing hackathons in a crowd-sourcing model, you can have easy access to other perspectives and diverse brains, which would be finding new solutions under a set time limit. In short, you are just one click away from running hackathons and finding best ideas in almost no time, provided you plan in advance.
When it comes to hiring from Hackathons, you can easily screen the best of the candidates by utilizing the rank lists and participant profile, which otherwise would have consumed a lot of effort in planning and organizing candidate screening and sourcing.
Employer branding made easy
Hackathons can also be a great place to improve or directionalize your employer branding. Employers can run hackathons on one of the Hackathon platforms and can use the platform for branding or re-branding by advertising on the contest page, showcasing their projects, values and ethos to your prospective employees.
Organized regularly, Hackathons can be easily transformed into forums for developers, massive events, meetups and exhibitions to showcase and promote your brand new products and services.
Employees, especially millennial are seen to be caring more for sense of meaning,the impact their work would have on society, a strong sense of purpose, qualities of products and services etc.So, hackathons could prove a key to touch these points by providing a taste of future work for the participants.
Facebook also conducts hackathons for recruitment purposes, where Mark Zukerburg , himself takes the role of a chief recruiter. This is a big motivation for developers all across the world to participate in huge numbers for this hiring hackathon
Learning and Development demystified
Companies can organize internal hackathons to improve the learning engagement experience of their employees in a fun-filled and innovative way. Internal engagements provide a great venue for the employees to forget about the day-to-day work and engage in creating breakthrough ideas through creation and collaborations between internal teams.These hackathons enrich the internal employees when they solve a problem through applying new skills, methods or concepts and through connecting dots by identifying new patterns. Collaborating with internal employees within international organizations , who in some cases belong to a different geography, region or are diverse in nature could bring a whole new experience to the table.
Conclusion
Citing the above aspects of hackathons, it is needless to say that hackathons would be the next game changers of the future, and their roles will extend to various aspects of diverse business functions. Whenever there would be a need to generate quick & quality ideas and high octane talent, hackathons would steal the show with their impressive speed and agility.
