Our Newest Hack: A Natural Intelligence Concepthon™
Here at Natural Intelligence, we never stop at “normal.” A traditional hackathon is a sprint-speed event where programmers, designers, project managers, and other techy experts collaborate together over intense 24–48 hours, building functioning software products. They’ve always been intended to develop new features(duh), but also to find new, innovative and business-savvy ideas.
On November 20, 2019, we did something new. Something conceptual. Something creative. Something innovative. We started by conceptualizing the solution to a problem: we want to come out with as many (or more) great concepts and ideas as our traditional hackathon last year, without closing the whole office for 48 hours. The hack? Include our business, marketing, content, finance, and legal teams together with the techies, utilizing our internal talent to build and brainstorm concepts, without interrupting the day-to-day workflow and business of our entire company. A new hackathon concept: a Concepthon™
We stuck with the innovation and great ideas but wanted to make a company-wide event that was inclusive of our many employees who aren’t programmers. Why concepts? Well, because coding new products and features take time, doesn’t always bear fruit for the business, and doesn’t welcome the inclusivity that Natural Intelligence is built on. Last year’s 2018 Hackathon bore some great ideas: this year we wanted to focus on great ideas, then take the top concepts and build them into reality within day-to-day business operations. We’re even able to go back, examine the other contestant groups’ concepts, and get those great concepts rolling too — overall, creating 60 ideas we can utilize.
How it Works: Starting a Concepthon™
Ahead of the Concepthon™ itself, we divided the whole company into sixty teams of five or six people from all company departments each. Each set of six teams focused around one business goal, or theme, such as “personalized experience,” “retention,” “data-driven business decisions,” or “automation.” Groups contained completely randomized people from each department, making sure people got to meet and collaborate with new Natural Intelligence employees they wouldn’t otherwise work with.
Groups were assigned a quiet workspace and a theme facilitator to help them through the brainstorming process and then got to the hard work: innovation. The facilitators each worked on themes that built on the skills and focus of their day-to-day work here at NI, allowing them to guide and oversee teams working within their expertise.
Long before winners were chosen, we narrowed down to 10 semi-finalist teams voted on by their peers. This company-wide project ends the day with two winners: one chosen by a team of judges from our senior management, and another, the “crowd’s choice,” voted on by participating Concepthon™ teams.
Our Wednesday began as usual, with NI employees hustling to the office to get cracking on the day’s challenges. We value more than just hard work though, so we started our day with fresh bagels, crunchy veggies, salty lox, and several varieties of cream cheese.
The creativity began! Employees collected their t-shirts, laptop accessory stickers, finished their first (or second) coffee of the day and split off into their predetermined Concepthon™ teams to get innovating.
Concepthon™ Innovation Looks Like…
As I walked around to check in on our employee teams, I heard colleagues telling each other encouragements, brainstorming the next steps and talking about the win-win situations that could come out of their concepts. I heard comments like, “Listen, we have to dream big here.” and “We have two great ideas, let’s run with both.” The freedom and lack of limitations of the Concepthon™ allowed groups to feel that the sky is truly the limit — or perhaps even past the clouds.
I heard great ideas getting thrown around by groups of employees who had met infrequently before but now worked as teammates, across platforms and departments.
The Semi-Finals
After a morning of big ideas and new teammates, we divided up for lunch. It was not a regular lunch at NI though; PPC and BizDev managers lunch together with Full Stack Developers and Architects they’ve never met before, while UX designers branch away from the Studio and Design team. It was great to see everyone mingling, working together, and ready to rock the semi-final pitches.
After three hours working on their concepts and time to eat lunch together, each of the ten themes got ready to pitch the concept they’d created to the thirty or so other people in their theme. Once all the theme’s teams had spoken, theme members voted on the theme favorite concept, which will move to the Concepthon™ finals.
Once all themes chose their finalists, we were left with the Top 10 groups continuing on to bring their concepts one step past ideation and prepare their pitches for the evening finals round. Other groups got back to work, ready to show up, stand up, and support their colleagues as they moved forward in the competition.
Drumroll Please…
Our judges’ favorite winning team, in the Virality theme, will surely help us to create a network effect. Once we launch it, I’m sure we will see a significant engagement improvement with our products. This concept ran neck-in-neck with the Crowd Favorite’ concept: “Giving Opens the Way for Receiving.” With the technology that we need to develop to bring it into life, this concept is living up to Natural Intelligence DNI core values in the Brands’ Value Proposition theme.
Both teams are our Winners!
Indeed, our NI teams all worked hard and innovated fantabulous ideas, leaving Natural Intelligence with a lot to think about, work on, and continue innovating in the coming year. Employees got to choose a crowd favorite, adding more crowd participation and including our brilliant teammates’ feedback and initiatives. Every team worked hard, and we look forward to seeing many of these great ideas live and kicking on our top products, brought to life by our incredibly innovative employees.
Until next year’s 2020 Concepthon™!
Thanks Samantha Naymark for editing
Yoav Tzuker, Chief Innovation & Ecosystem Natural Intelligence
