Evolving UniHack

Every business, big or small, new or established, needs to constantly keep on top of what they stand for as an organisation.

It’s an easy thing to forget to do — the cut-and-thrust of the day to day startup grind sometimes makes thinking about the big picture feel like a luxury for another day. But getting your vision and market-fit right early on is so important. And, as with all the best things, you’re going to go through iterations. Sometimes — often, even — these take the form of incremental tweaks and changes to your day to day running. And sometimes, there are lightbulb moments where things you’ve been striving to articulate and reach for as a company drop into place and make perfect sense.

We’ve recently had the second one.

Even as a company that runs hackathons, where we see it happening all the time, often in the early hours of an overnight hack, it can still take you by surprise.

In our case, the context was a strategy weekend aimed at preparing us for the year ahead. We have several events under our belt now, and we wanted to take the weekend to evaluate and refine our model and messaging.

Whilst we made a good start, conversation about the big picture problem we’re tackling returned to scaleable technological solutions, and what that could look like. Rather than continue to come back to this issue, we decide early in the weekend to focus in on it. And wow did we focus… Before we knew what had happened, it was Monday morning and we had a whole new arm of the business that we are looking to roll out.

We’ve always been passionate about providing a space for young people to develop new skills, meet new people, and find the right paths for themselves. That hasn’t changed, and neither will it. What we’re doing though, is evolving how we approach that mission.

And it seems fitting — as we’re sure any of our hackathon attendees could attest — that this happened when a group of like-minded people with a range of backgrounds got together over a weekend to tackle a common problem.

With so much emphasis on day-to-day work, we’re grateful that we took the time to have our strategy weekend and evolve our plans. Even as a mission-driven organisation, its easy to forget to take time to hone your solution.

Whatever else 2017 is, it’s certainly going to be an exciting year for UniHack — and we can’t wait to share our developments with you!

Stay tuned…