Ever been to a hackathon?!
We’ve come across this term a few times recently. Seems to be the latest buzzword in technology fields. Simply put – bring a group of the right people together & ask them to generate great new ideas.
Facebook apparently hold them every 6-8 weeks to develop new features, LinkedIn launched their first HR-hackathon in 2015 to explore increasing employee engagement, and Cisco have followed suit this year with an HR-hackathon aimed at “breaking HR and putting it back together better”.
This obviously needs a lot of planning and a good structure to enable it to work well – but the key seems to be to NOT to provide any direction to the conversations – ask great questions and let the group create whatever comes up.
We’ve long known that to really innovate we need to avoid putting any boundaries on the creative process so there’s nothing knew there – the excitement around hackathons appears to be volume of people you get involved at any one time and making use of technology to facilitate bringing people together.
If you had a hackathon in your business what question would you want answers to?
