Hackathons are intensive innovation events, where participants have only 24 hours to develop solutions for a given business challenge. Teams work intensively with mentors, they employ agile methodologies and adopt design-focused techniques.
Months of work can be concentrated into just a few hours; non-viable ideas are quickly filtered out leaving only the most effective solutions. The event is also a great tool for accessing new talent or boosting employee engagement.
Innovation Champions are the people who inside or outside of the organization challenge the status quo and have the right mindset, skills and network to drive transformation. Hackathon is a great tool to discover future talents for your innovative activities and find breakthrough ideas to your specific business challenges, which can serve as a basis for large-scale innovation programs.
Defining the challenges
Design Terminal organizes a 3-5-hour workshop together with the management of our partner company to define the issue to be solved. This challenge should be inspiring and complex, yet manageable even for teams of entrepreneurs without extensive knowledge and years of experience about the relevant industry.
Finding the right people
- Before the event, Design Terminal conducts scouting over 6-8 weeks, mainly through its online channels, which are also used to keep teams informed and handle applications.
- Each team consists of maximum 4, minimum 2 members with diverse professional backgrounds.
- Pre-selection is handled by Design Terminal, while the final selection of the best teams involves the partner company.
Working hard for 24 hours
- The 24-hour hackathon kicks off with an inspiring keynote speech and continues with team briefings.
- During the event, mentors of Design Terminal and employees of the partner company help the development of startups.
- At the end of the hackathon, all teams showcase their ideas.
- Immediately after these presentations, the jury decides on the winners with the top three awarded prizes. The jury consist of five persons, two from Design Terminal and three from the partner.