Innovation hackathon-makerthon-sprints

How to avoid a case of “The Emperor’s New Wearables”

If you have “innovation” within an algorithm’s reach of your job title I’ve probably tried to contact you.

I was hellbent on learning all things innovation and quick insights were derived from contacting people with “innovation” in their title.

This was about eight years ago or so when innovation labs were in vogue and every advertising agency and consultancy had to have an innovation lab to demonstrate to clients they were creating the future.

I ran a few advertising-flavoured hackathons during this time, so I would like to document a few key learnings:

This will probably become a bigger series as there is much to write about, but for now, here are three simple learnings.

Follow through; prototype to deployment

Ensure you can make good on developing ideas developed during a hackathon event or innovation initiative. This will require:

• committed budget to develop prototypes through to deployment
• an experienced and dedicated product manager (or similarly capable) to manage development and deployment

During my time producing a number of innovation hackathon slash sprints, there has been a lack of investment from hosts to develop the prototypes built during the events.

Startup camps and hackathons in a South African context aim to bridge one of the widest divides in the world, so mission-critical must be to ensure hosts are committed to building the bridge.

Match the brief with the right level of skills

For a brief to be rewarding, ensure it is difficult enough to be fun, but not too difficult that it causes anxiety and a sense of overwhelming failure.

Sometimes hackathon challenges can be so unrealistic that participants feel it’s too difficult and they shut down i.e. creative constipation!

For example, if the brief requires solving a highly technical challenge it’s important to have some working knowledge of the tech. This could involve some pre-event training to upskill participants.

Balance creativity and engineering in teams

In my experience, the best results have come from highly curated teams. This means curating team members carefully and ensuring that each team has a high level of creative skills and engineering smarts that inspire each other.

This requires a level of matchmaking beforehand and a lot of research to find the right people, but this approach has the best output by a long mile.

If you’re interested in seeing the first-ever hackathon I hosted in the basement of my then agency, FCB hellocompter in Johannesburg, here you go.