Showing posts with label contest. Show all posts
Showing posts with label contest. Show all posts

Thursday, May 17, 2018

Guest Post: FatigueHack - Hackathon done right

This is a guest post from Jayden Castillo, a colleague of mine at Accenture and an active member of Canberra's innovation community. Read the original post at LinkedIn:

I recently attended the Australian Trucking Association (ATA)'s Hackathon aiming to target driver fatigue, aptly named 'FatigueHack'. I'm fairly new to Hackathons, this was my second after the AUSTRAC Codeathon in March (where I was a mentor), and my first experience as a participant along side two of my Accenture team mates.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, a Hackathon is a rapid solution environment where competitors are required to address complex challenges in a short amount of time, and come up with a working prototype to illustrate their concept. In this case, teams had 2 days to develop a viable business model which is capable of addressing fatigue in the trucking industry. Following these two days, each of the 8 participating teams had to pitch their solutions to judges and the top 3 pitched to the entire Australian Trucking Association Annual Conference delegation.

I find hackathons to be a fantastic opportunity to show what's possible, and even more impressive, what's possible in just two days. There were a few aspects of FatigueHack in particular which I believe made it exceptional, and demonstrates not only what is possible, but what innovation and solutioning will be like in The New. The 3 points below are the perfect recipe for innovation, which we must all embrace to stay at the cutting edge.

Short Timelines
We all have a tendency to procrastinate, to plan things excessively, and to over analyse. This is a product of the anti-failure mindset we've been groomed for, we naturally try to think out the whole solution and resolve any issues before we actually start doing. Being under quite a strict time limit means there simply isn't enough time for this. You are forced to make decisions and move things along quickly. This means you might not have all the problems solved straight away, but it also means there's less time between idea and the all important testing of your idea, so you can identify and resolve issues much faster.

Probably the most interesting part here was to demonstrate how unnecessary it is to give long timelines to (particularly innovative) projects. When your timeline is short, you cut out what's not important and make big strides in your solution.

Concentrated ideation
They say that innovation happens when ideas collide, and FatigueHack certainly had a lot of colliding ideas. Think and Grow Rich author Napoleon Hill describes this like brainwaves being radiated out into the ether, and being picked up on by other brains on the same wavelength. While this description might a bit unscientific, I believe there is a lot to be said for the buzz created when a lot of excited people are in close proximity. Your confidence goes up, your creativity goes up, and you are generally more open to thoughts and ideas.

Having run remote meetings and workshop sessions in the past, I can definitely attest to the value of having everyone in the same room, even if they're not all working on the same idea. Body language, excitement, drawing, gestures are all things which (still) don't translate well over digital media.

Easy access to expertise
Innovating or designing in a bubble is a dangerous thing to do. It is basically impossible to know if you're on the right track without some kind of feedback, so it becomes really easy to go down the wrong path and either solve the wrong problem or create a solution which nobody wants. I think FatigueHack managed this really well - they ran the Hackathon in the same venue at the same time as the ATA's annual conference. This was invaluable, because it meant if we had any questions at all, we could find an expert on the area within 5 minutes by simply asking around.

Having such easy access to expertise makes innovating much easier. It allows you to validate ideas very quickly, and when we were listening to the truckers talking about their experience it stimulated new ideas quickly. Our ability to iterate and refine was exponentially higher than in a normal workplace, and ideas were changing and evolving in time frames of minutes. I would love to see this translate to my (and everyone's) daily work, because the potential for generating great solutions is enormous.

Closing thoughts
This Hackathon really demonstrated to me what the future of work looks like. By getting a team together in a highly concentrated, intense environment, and providing more information and experts than we could possibly digest in 2 days, there were some fantastic outcomes (the winning idea is moving forward with creating a business!).

My personal mission is to help businesses and organisations think and act like startups, and FatigueHack is a great example of how to do that.

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Wednesday, July 23, 2014

VicHealth launches Physical Activity Innovation Challenge

VicHealth appears to be one of only a few agencies across Australian state and federal governments that has made a solid attempt at introducing public challenges as an adjunct to traditional policy approaches.

While most governments in Australia still use the same techniques for policy creation that they've used for 80 or more years, after the success of last year's Seed Challenge, VicHealth recently launched a new challenge around physical activity innovation.

With $400,000 in start-up funds available to be awarded to the best ideas, the new challenge invites sports bodies, entrepreneurs and changemakers to develop innovative approaches to get more Victorians physically active.

With information available at VicHealth's website, the Physical Activity Innovation Challenge both brings the public and various sporting and innovation bodies into the policy development process, and helps expose the department to the latest thinking and ideas around prompting people to take up physical activity.

This is the type of thinking that more Australian policy makers need to adopt in recognition that expertise is no longer concentrated within government agencies, and that they need to look further than the 'usual suspects' of lobbyists, activists and pressure groups, for great ideas to feed into policy development processes.



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Sunday, June 03, 2012

GovHack presentations and judging liveblog

Hi, I'll be liveblogging the presentations and judging from GovHack in Canberra below as it happens.

All the tears and all the cheers as 42 entrants go head for head for around $40,000 in prizes and the street cred of being a GovHack winner.

You can view all the entrants on the GovHack website.

Vote and comment on them now at govhack.dialogue-app.com (your views will be taken into account by the judges).



Photos from the GovHack presentations

GovHack crowd in Canberra
GovHack crowd in Canberra

The big screen at GovHack

Watching the Sydney GovHack crowd















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