Every day businesses come across new terms because of pool of innovations in business world. Businesses face organizational inertias and require innovation driven cultures to break those inertias. This innovation offer baptism of fire and requires you to dive into the problem and allows its employees to have a creative experience for the problem.
Hackathon is the latest rage in business and owing to its benefits and usability it is trending in the business world. Hackathon is nothing but a creative way of solving Problem. It is an event of a day or two where entrepreneurs and software developers, design developers and various other such innovators collaborate to create a hardware or software project. There is basically a group of 2-5 individuals, who collaboratively investigate or dive into a problem which begins with introduction to the project and ends with a wrap up session demonstrating the accomplishments.
In today’s world where a plethora of options are available, finding the appropriate hackathon management platform is the topmost challenge for the large organizations so that they can have best of the talent, create its pool and foster innovation and thus remain in the race and win over the consumers. With appropriate hackathon management platform, companies have access to crowd based solution with innovative crowd synthesized ideas by detailed study of concepts along with minimum investment of capital, time and efforts. Basically the idea is to minimize the inputs i.e. expenses, time and efforts and maximize the output i.e. new innovations, improved sales, etc. Hackathon makes it easy to implement those innovations by creating such environment.
Hackathon encourages the old way of investigating the problems and workings and offers to scale innovation and build new features and assist companies to have the best of the customer experience and increase revenues.
Depending upon the objectives and resources, Company can choose any Hackathon whether it is internal, external, online, offline or application based and so on. Some of the most prominent Hackathon types are explained as follows:
1) Internal Hackathon- In such a hackathon the participants are the employees and the experts who are already working within the organization.
2) External Hackathon- External Hackathon is the one in which people are not from within the organization rather outside talents are engaged who are targeted to achieve the set goal. People in any corner of the world can take a part in this. This is a very effective way as even the talent that is very far away from the work place can be tapped.
3) Online hackathon-In this, Companies take participants online. All the activities are carried online only and nothing is done in the physical space.
4) Offline Hackathons- In such a hackathon participants are recruited, existing situations are analyzed and creative ideas are generated and it all happens at a real offline location and not in a virtual space
5) Hackathons for developing applications- These Hackathons are Specific platform based. For example- Development of games, desktop operating system, APIs and various other online applications.
6) Hackathons especially for Programming Languages- These are based on different programming language like JavaScript, C++, etc., and they always focus to improve features.
7) Special Hackathons dedicated to An Issue- These are the Hackathons dedicated to solve social issues like illiteracy, health and other area specific issues.. These Hackathons aim at empowering people by providing a way out or provide a relief from the problem.
8) Demographic Hackathons- these are the hackathons where a specific Demographic group like females, professionals, etc. are targeted. They basically aim at creating brand awareness.
9) Industry-specific hackathons- These hackathons focus on a particular industry. Any industry facing any issue of idea slump might conduct a hackathon to get new ideas.
Organizing Hackathon, though, is not a very easy task. Care has to be taken of various elements while conducting the same only then it can be made a successful affair otherwise it may lead to wasted time and efforts.
Important points to be considered while organizing a Hackathon are explained below:
- Propose the idea for Hackathon: Though Hackathons are very famous these days, still there are many organizations which are not completely aware of such and may resist taking part in such. While proposing one must convince the party by explaining them about the various benefits of conducting hackathon.
- Create sufficient Buzz: Create excitement for the hackathon so that the participants are filled with enthusiasm. Such a thing will ensure effective results otherwise the participants may not be motivated enough which will result in inefficient results.
- Plan Each and Everything in Advance: On the actual day, there will be no time to improvise or think about what to do, so the best way is to plan everything down to little details in advance.
- Do things different: Try to make your Hackathon as unique and memorable as possible so that the participants take special interest in it. Be as innovative and creative while planning a hackathon, for example, having special snacks at the venue, etc.
- Perform a demo: Like a pilot experiment, conduct Hackathon initially on a low level with in house employees and key persons of the organization and take their views so that weak areas can be recognized and improved upon to ensure the success while conducting the Hackathon.
Benefits of hackathon management platforms
Hackathon Management Platforms have many benefits-
1) These Platforms help organization to explore innovative technologies.
2) It Helps In sourcing the incubation Programs.
3) It assists in Building potential Start-ups.
4) Many Hackathons provide solution for Social Causes.
5) Hackathons make way for deep analyses of the problem and help in making predictions.
6) The Innovative thinking is duly recognized and rewarded.
7) It creates a unique Brand of the Organization and its Products separating it from various other competitors available in the market.
8) It is especially useful in case of dead end or where there is an innovation block, the company has run out of ideas to solve the problem; Hackathons provide a way out of such complex situations.
