Why companies are turning to internal hackathons

Companies are always looking for an edge and looking for ways to encourage their employees to innovate. One way to do this is to organize an internal hackathon around a theme and ask employees to attack a problem together. This not only brings new ideas and ways to solve problems for the business and its customers, but also has the added benefit of allowing staff to collaborate and share ideas.

Brandon Kessler, CEO and co-founder of DevPost, a company that helps clients organize and manage internal and external hackathons, says he’s seen how hackathons help companies encourage employees to solve big problems.

“Without a doubt, innovation and collaboration are the two key elements of value when it comes to organizing internal hackathons, and almost everyone wants both,” Kessler told TechCrunch. He said coming up with new ideas was the number one priority when organizing these events.

“Let’s give everyone the opportunity to come up with ideas and solve problems, and become more effective,” he said. “Nowadays, in my opinion, innovation is synonymous with AI. Of the 1,200 hackathons we did last year, I think 10 weren’t about AI. I’ve never seen anything like what I’ve seen with the rise of AI hackathons.

When you get a group of people in a room (or even virtually) and let them rant about a particular issue, good things usually happen. “Interdisciplinary involvement, innovation, those ideas that come from people working with different stakeholders than you usually do, that’s what hackathons produce,” he said.

Netta Retter, director of innovation programs at Okta, says she discovered the value of internal hackathons in her previous job at Facebook, then applied it to her current role.

“I think Facebook realized early on the power of hackathons to really foster a culture of innovation in a very broad way in terms of influencing what was built and how it was built. And I think something that’s really amazing about Okta is how they’ve really doubled down on that in our hack culture as well,” Retter told TechCrunch.

This has manifested itself more recently in the search for ways to use AI to improve the products and services offered by the company. Hackathons help bring remote-first companies together to work on these problems.

“We were able to build a very strong hacking culture globally, and I think diving into generative AI was one of the places where they were able to show how hackathons are a very powerful way to introduce new tools and give everyone the opportunity to use them. They really influence what we build and how we build it in a bottom-up way, which I find pretty amazing,” Retter said.

Chris Aidan, vice president of innovation and inclusive and emerging technologies at Estée Lauder, sees these hackathons the same way, but because of his role, they tend to focus on topics of more human interest than company-specific ones, looking at things like ways to improve breast cancer detection or help visually impaired people apply makeup without assistance. But the method remains the same, whatever the objective.

“We do one hackathon a year that both the public and employees participate in, and then we do internal challenge-based hackathons with a particular business unit or one of our brands that’s trying to solve something,” said Aiden. They also hold brainstorming sessions, which he calls idea-a-thons, which involve creating a no-code solution or perhaps a low-code solution.

Retter says that bringing together people in varied roles, that is, technical and non-technical people, really helps bring new ideas to life. “I think having more diverse roles leads to better products and better innovation. And I think diversity in hackathons is really key,” she said.

“No matter how technical people are or how amazing things you build, unless you have diverse perspectives, different lived experiences, people showing different ways to use the things you create, it doesn’t matter. of importance. the same impact,” she said.