A hacker wanting to gain data on organization ideas and inventions
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Demystifying hackathonsOver 80% of Fortune 100 companies conduct hackathons to drive innovation. More than 50% of the hackathons are recurring events, indicating that they are a reliable tool for sustained innovation….. HackerEarth analyzed close to 1000 hackathons conducted over a 2-year period around the globe. The U.S. leads the way with over 350 hackathons every year, followed by India and the U.K. Additionally, the survey found that private companies accounted for almost 50% of all hackathons conducted, universities hosted about 30%, and, interestingly, non-profit and government organizations conducted over 10%. For more insights such as the following, You can read the complete Global Hackathon Report here What is a hackathon?Hackathon is a tool to drive sustained innovation and crowdsource solutions to address pressing real-life business problems and social issues. A hackathon is typically a time-bound competitive event where participants collaborate to build proofs of concept and minimum viable products for a specific pre-defined problem or to innovate. Why should you conduct a hackathon?Hackathons have some clear advantages over traditional innovation management processes. They are inclusive, agile, promote multidisciplinary collaboration, and have shorter innovation cycles that are better suited to addressing fast-changing consumer demands. Along with generating new ideas and future proofing a business, hackathons help de-risk product development, improve employee engagement and retention, find excellent talent, enable customer focused innovation and engagement, accelerate the speed of innovation and problem solving, enhance collaboration between teams, bring about cost savings through R&D, and build community, brand, and leadership. Read More How does a hackathon help in innovation?“If you look at history, innovation does not come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect,” says Steven Johnson, an American author. In a way, hackathons complement traditional innovation methods. Through hackathons, companies harvest ideas and knowledge to take their technology to the next level. With the added advantage of crowd-driven ideation, companies can now move fast, reduce the time-to-market, and get ahead in the race. Traditionally, the responsibility of coming up with innovative products, services, and business models was assigned only to a handful of people within the organization. Generally, a dedicated R&D or a specific unit for innovation was assigned to the task. Nowadays, companies, both big and small, conduct hackathons to drive innovation. With the way the workforce today is connected today, collaborative innovation is easy. Concrete ideas derived from hackathons have helped deliver top-notch products, better customer experience, and greater revenue. Companies have interpreted the hackathon concept in various ways. However, McKinsey says that top companies haven’t fully understood the potential of hackathons as tools of disruptive innovation. How can you organize a hackathon?The entire process of organizing a hackathon, marketing the event, driving registrations, ideating, and creating prototypes typically takes 30 to 40 days. An innovation program cannot get more agile than this. Once you (the organizer) have decided why you want to conduct a hackathon, the next steps include deciding whom you want to engage and how you want to engage. Depending on their objective, companies may thus opt for either an internal hackathon or an external hackathon. Internal Audience – Internal Hackathon If the objective is to engage your employees, promote a collaborative work environment, or create a culture of innovation, an internal hackathon is your best bet. What is an internal hackathon?Conducted only for employees, internal hackathons give them the freedom to forget about everyday responsibilities and restrictions and build something innovative. Teams collaborate to develop a proposal, build a prototype, and pitch ideas to senior management to secure funding or win recognition. These events promote a maker culture that’s important in today’s tech companies. Companies such as Google, Whirlpool, and Facebook hold internal hackathons to encourage new product innovation by their employees. For example, the Like button, chat button, and timeline of Facebook were created during its company-internal hackathons. Companies keep a closer watch on their data as well while employees “flex their creative muscles” at low risk. What are the benefits of internal hackathons?Internal hackathons are an excellent way to drive innovation within the company. If done well, periodic hackathons can help to
What are the typical objectives of an internal hackathon?
What are the basic steps of an internal hackathon?Companies need to find themes that are fun for the employees yet in line with business goals. Following are the basic steps of an internal hackathon, but there are a lot of details that need to be ironed out:
What are the stages of an internal hackathon?As with any hackathon, the first step will be idea submission. The event which could be a hackfest for 24 to 48 days or a two-phase hackathon where employees across all levels of the organization and its branches world over submit their ideas via an idea management platform. This phase could last between 2 and 4 weeks. In the second phase, an offline event could be held on Day 15 or 30 of the campaign where chosen ideas are translated into prototypes. Following the presentation and judging, the winners are announced and feted. Who owns the IP rights in an internal hackathon?In case of an internal hackathon, all rights are owned by the organization conducting it. The company has the full ownership of the inventions made by its employees. * Companies need to ensure that employee agreements have provision for hackathon participation; when employees go for external hackathons make sure those are not related to the employer’s business interests to avoid conflict. Companies should provide IP counsel about IP risks and opportunities before the event; it doesn’t pay to prohibit participation and alienate them. What factors indicate the success of an internal hackathon?
Read more: Measuring innovation performance What are external hackathons?In this type of hackathons, a company engages people within and outside the organization. The invites are often influenced by the themes and goals that are set. According to Gartner, “CIOs can use external hackathons to change culture, improve customer experience, find new revenue opportunities, reduce costs, engage new ecosystems, and improve talent management.” External Audience – External Hackathon External hackathons help companies engage with external audience. The external audience can be a developer community, data scientist community, or even the general public. “KONE tapped into the HackerEarth’s 2M+ developer community through an external hackathon to crowdsource innovative ideas to modernize elevators.“ Jayapraksh.B The global elevator market is expected to grow from $88 billion to $125 billion by 2021. That’s a steep rise. This market expansion will provide a massive opportunity for elevator manufacturers who can develop innovative, next-gen smart elevators. KONE, one of the world’s largest elevator manufacturers, took an interesting approach of leveraging the open-innovation model to capitalize on the market expansion. It partnered with IBM to launch a hackathon-based innovation campaign. OutcomeOf the 52 applications built, KONE shortlisted the top 10 teams from the Phase 2 and they will go to KONE’s Chennai R&D center for the final Phase 3 round and work on actual elevators to showcase their ideas and build something to make People Flow® more effective and smarter. The winning ideas were chosen based on Novelty, Design, Technical Intelligence, and Business Impact and were awarded a cash prize of $10,000. What are the benefits of external hackathons?
*If the focus is on the output, the objective could be IP development, branding, or innovation. How do you choose to engage?In this
type of hackathons, a company engages people within and outside the organization. Onsite hackathonAt onsite hackathon, participants work collaboratively to innovate at a physical location. In this format, organizers will need to consider time, geographical, and logistical constraints while designing the event. In onsite hackathon, organizing workshops, hosting knowledge-sharing sessions, and getting the venue, tools, and other aspects of the working environment ready are important. Online hackathonCompanies use online hackathons to engage their employees simultaneously across different geographies and time zones to solve a problem or drive innovation and used to engage with external audience of wider geography. They are also used for narrowly-defined coding challenges, which test participants’ experience and expertise. 3 non-profit organizations partnered with HackerEarth to solve the biggest problems of democracy in an online hackathon. A robust, dedicated platform, such as HackerEarth, is used to connect with the right audience, set reasonable goals around what work will be accomplished during the hackathon, gather and record the ideas and prototypes. Along with providing greater reach, this format makes it easier for organizers to shortlist, monitor, and coach participants and evaluate their ideas using an automated platform. Although most activities involved in the organization of onsite and online hackathons are similar, certain tasks such as registration, rules, and promotion will include a few different subtasks as well. Hand-holding participants can also be easier than in in-person events. Online events enjoy obvious advantages:
Online hackathons come with a unique set of rules. You will have to clearly address issues related to submissions and judging. Here is an example of an FAQ section and a Rules section that can give you an idea about the kinds of queries participants of an online hackathon may have. 2-Phase hackathonsHybrid events, which have both online and onsite phases, improve levels of engagement significantly. The initial ideation phase is online, which gives more control over the shortlisted ideas, and the prototype building phase, which is onsite. Future Group conducted a hybrid/2-phase hackathon to crowdsource digital solutions to master customer data management. The entire process is slightly shorter than it is for online hackathons, lasting from 30 to 60 days. A two-phase hackathon gives the opportunity for better interaction with the participants, mentoring and branding. Imperatives of organizing a hackathonStage one: Deciding the format, timing, website, date, venue, sponsors, rules, giveaways (4 months before the event) Once the objectives, the context, and the purpose of the hackathon has been decided, you go to Stage 2. This should be done well in advance, at least 3 to 6 months before if possible. Choosing hackathon theme and problem statementFor a solution that makes a difference in terms of quality and relevance, a succinct, focused theme is non-negotiable. Before you get gung-ho about the hackathon, be it online or onsite, you need to have clearly defined goals in place if it is a themed hackathon. Unlike open-ended hackathons, themed hackathons expect participants to work on specific projects, such as those that require you to use a company’s technology or for social good. The diversity of creative ideas could be less than exciting, but it might be more amenable to a first-time hacker and to get sponsors. Choosing a broad theme is likely to be less restrictive. For a company hackathon, the organizer or committee will need to identify key business areas that are suffering because of definite challenges that haven’t been addressed satisfactorily. A well-defined problem statement will define your hackathon strategy. Focusing on the challenge during the event will require mentors in the form of managers, experts, or speakers to provide real-time feedback to guarantee solutions are designed keeping in mind the end user. Themes can be anything from boosting the visibility of a brand to creating a new startup to developing a new app for disaster management to designing a launch campaign. Here’s a table with a few popular hackathon themes. Hackathons often have broad themes or domains and then sub-themes. For example, healthcare can be the theme and re-engineering patient experience can be the more focused challenge statement. Here’s an example from a recent hackathon conducted for GE Healthcare (HealthHack), India. Purpose (Why hackathon): Crowdsource Solutions for real-life business problems Theme: Digital Healthcare Problem
Statement: Themes: Based on the possible solutions for the problem statement, the themes of the hackathon were outlined:
Read more about GE Healthcare Hackathon>> Choosing your target audienceChoosing your target audience depends on the problem you are trying to solve and the success criteria. Before you find your community of interest—employees, developers, startups, customers, or students, decide how creative and technically competent you want them to be. How relevant will your audience be if the objective of the hackathon is digital transformation or brand enhancement? You would want the deliverable to be an idea, a scenario, a prototype, an app, an interface, a proof of concept, or a turnkey solution; these different levels of completion also decide your participant group. Hackathon FormatIs your hackathon a physical or a virtual one? Will it be private or public? Will registration be free? How many stages will there be? Duration of HackathonIs your hackathon going to be for 24/36/48 hours or longer? DateDoes your proposed date fall on public holidays or in the holiday season? Check websites like Meetup or tweet to find out it of it clashes with niche conferences or other similar hackathons. Your target audience will tell you what days are most likely to work; for example, students could find weeknights tough. Weekends are most popular. Ensure you factor in extra minutes to prepare the venue and clean up after the event. Hackathons are more frequent between January and April and September and November in Europe and the U.S. WebsiteBig brands that have recurring hackathons can update the website when required. But for a first-timer, your website should have a unique and appealing design. Ensure your website has all details pertinent to the hackathons—registration, eligibility, requirements, timelines, learning resources, judges, winning criteria, prizes, swags, referral programs, etc. For example, get your sign-up form ready and explain the registration and selection processes. Be clear about the Creative Commons License and the IP rights on your website. Here’s an example (check out Article 12). Choosing the hackathon venueDeciding where you are going to hold your hackathon needs some work.
Hackathon sponsorsThis is could well be the hardest task. Getting people to part with their money is never easy. How can you raise funds for a student or non-profit hackathon? First, you need to come up with a budget. Once you have your estimates, you devise a plan for sponsorship. Whom do you target and how? Sponsors will buy in when they want to boost the brand’s visibility, recruit skilled workers or interns, or get real-time feedback on application programming interfaces or some product or service. Create a budget
Know when to approach your sponsors
Create value for your sponsors
Potential hackathon sponsors
Hackathon code of conductCreate a pleasant, safe, and non-discriminatory event for a diverse set of participants. Having a well-defined set of rules helps in case of any issues cropping up during the event.
Judges and Speakers
Hackathon prizes
Most Popular GiftsGift CertificateTabletSmart WatchGo ProAmazon EchoGaming consolesDronesPortable hard drivesApple MacBookPaid HolidaysHackathon promotion
Guidance, knowledge transfer and supportIt is essential to provide as much contextual knowledge and technical support to the audience for them to better understand your theme and problem statements. Accenture conducted a Blockchain hackathon targeting the developer community. It organized a series of webinars on the topic to enhance the knowledge of the participants.
Getting ready for the event(1 month to 1 week before the event)
Putting it all together on D-Day (Day Zero)After months of planning and worrying about the hackathon, you don’t want to leave anything to chance. Make a checklist. Get to your venue early or the night before and set up everything you can possibly. SETTING UP Get the venue ready
Check for possible power and hardware issues
Kicking off the hackathon
Keeping things going
Post-hackathon activities
Choosing your hackathon management platform
A hackathon management software solution — SprintHackerEarth’s hackathon management software allows you to host a hackathon and manage it end-to-end with ease. The steps of the hackathon workflow are as follows:
Sprint confers the following advantages:
ConclusionWe’ve come up with this basic guide relying on expertise gleaned from conducting hundreds of hackathons world over. Although there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy, the above-mentioned points should help you maximize your efforts in organizing an effective and well-designed event for any kind of organization to achieve its desired outcomes. 80% of Fortune 100 companies use hackathons to foster innovation.Which of the following could be results of a data breach?Depending on the type of data involved, the consequences can include destruction or corruption of databases, the leaking of confidential information, the theft of intellectual property and regulatory requirements to notify and possibly compensate those affected.
Which role governs and dictates the procedures and purpose of data usage?In GDPR and other privacy laws, the data controller has the most responsibility when it comes to protecting the privacy and rights of the data's subject, such as the user of a website. Simply put, the data controller controls the procedures and purpose of data usage.
How can the lack of logic statement tests of memory location variables be detrimental?How can the lack of logic statement tests on memory location variables be detrimental to software in development? A malicious process can alter the execution environment to create a null pointer, and crash the program.
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