We wrapped up the Think with Terra Ideathon 200+ Ideas with blockchain applications!

India is a hotbed for developer talent and the Think with Terra Ideathon put this into perspective for us. In collaboration with Terra — a payments-based blockchain, we set up an ideathon that showcased a set of solutions that can be built on blockchains.

As innovators in the blockchain space, we believe that ideas are powerful things that can create an impact on the world we live in. With that said, we wanted to challenge the Indian developer community to share their knowledge of what can be accomplished with blockchain technology by identifying issues that people face on a daily basis, be it in the overall business industry or for causes such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Think with Terra was a means to challenge India’s developer, startup and student communities to share their ideas with us accordingly.

The Ideathon was focused on streamlining the ideation process by creating specific tracks with popular blockchain use cases:

• ‎FinTech
• ‎Logistics
• ‎Open Innovation (Ideas that can solve problems in any other industry verticals and social causes)‎

To incentivise the participants to put forward their best efforts, we put together prizes from a pool of Rs 5 Lakhs (T&C Apply).

The Think with Terra Journey

With a vision to challenge the movers and shakers of India’s developer, entrepreneur and student circles, Think with Terra turned out to be a channel that burgeoned a community for Terra in India. To enable this community to participate, ideate and learn more about opportunities in the blockchain space, we organised a series of meet-ups and industry talks. We also introduced Terra as a blockchain platform that can be used to build solutions for real-world problems.

In addition to the meetups, we also put together a roundtable discussion featuring experts in fintech and blockchain space on the scope for blockchain applications in the fintech and payments sector.

By November 2020, we closed the Ideathon with 235 idea submissions, four meet-ups and 521 member-strong community and went on to hold the Finale event for Think with Terra on 30 January 2021.

The Finale event was aimed at announcing the winners. However, we wanted to end the Ideathon on an inspiring note for the participants and the community. To add this sort of value, Nicholas Platias — Head of Research, Terra, shared an inspiring talk on starting-up as a developer. Based on his experience, building a Guru Labs — a Lightspeed backed machine learning startup that models risk and fraud in commercial insurance. He also shed light on what it takes to get a startup acquired based on his experience working at Nest (acquired by Google) and RelateIQ (acquired by Salesforce).

The Finale culminated in announcing the winners! With that said, meet the winners of the Think with Terra Ideathon.

Insights from Think with Terra

Think with Terra was a great learning experience for us as much as it was for its participants. Here are some interesting insights we gained:

• The ideathon garnered the most interest from the student circles in India. A majority of the registrations — over 90% of a total of 235 registrations — were from students pursuing an education in the engineering field.
• ‎In addition to the native tracks in the Ideathon (FinTech and Logistics), we got an interesting mix of ideas from several industry verticals. Eighteen per cent of the registrations were from the FinTech space, about 7% of the registrations were from the Logistics Track, and the Open Innovation track brought forward over 65% of the registrations.
• A majority of the ideas from the open innovation space were from the healthcare and education industry verticals. There were also a lot of ideas that provided solutions for problems faced in the social welfare landscape.
• Given that we’re in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, over 20% of the ideas submitted were focused on solving problems related to the pandemic. These ideas were based on ‎Outbreak Tracking, ‎Contact Tracking, ‎Donation Tracking and Clinical Trial Management.

In closing…

The biggest stories of tech and inventions that disrupted life as we know it came from an idea that was nurtured into existence. The ideas that we saw were not only innovative, but were inspired, largely applicable as business use cases, and sensitive to the problems that people face on a day-to-day basis. Think with Terra was a great primer for India’s future generations.

We’re really happy to be connected to a community with a talented, inspired, and ambitious set of individuals. We’d like to give a special mention to all those who took part and thank them for being a part of this journey.

Follow us to participate in more programmes like #ThinkWithTerra; it’s a great learning experience! Don’t take our word for it! Watch the video testimonials of the winners of the programme.