A hackathon is a design sprint-like event, in which developers and others involved in software development collaborate intensively on software projects. Hackathons are not only great team-building events, they are also proving grounds for innovative solutions and ideas.

We wanted to use our hackathon to collaborate with our clients on real challenges that they are experiencing and that could be solved with data-driven solutions. Hence, prior to the hackathon, we reached out to some of our clients and inquired their interest in joining and providing us with use cases for the hackathon.

We learned that several of them were contemplating solving business challenges by using data and they were happy to grab the opportunity to participate.

Haldex, Region Skåne and Scandinavian Cosmetics provided us with descriptions of real business challenges they have and with the data they believed could be relevant to solve the challenges.

Scandinavian Cosmetics informing about their challenges.

With the challenges in place, team formation started, and we had 7 teams that consisted of our own business consultants, architects, developers and designers. We organised a Q&A session with each of the participating clients in order to better understand their challenges and data and our teams started discussing ideas on how to tackle the challenges.

The hackathon took place over two days, 25th and 26th of September, at our main office in Malmö. After the initial introduction we kicked off the hackaton on the Friday afternoon and the teams started working. In following 24 hours everybody worked hard on bringing their ideas to life by building data-driven solutions.

Two of the Hackathon-teams in action.

On Saturday afternoon, the teams finished with the work and they started with the presentations. All teams managed to prepare presentations and live demos for the solutions they were working on, and they were ready to present it to the judges. We’ve seen a lot of great data-driven solutions using different innovative technologies in the presentations. Both teams and organizers were impressed and proud of what they managed to achieve in such a short time and the judges had a hard time to select the best solution for each challenge. After the announcement of the winners we had a nice dinner and a small celebration.

One of three winning teams.

A couple of weeks later the results were presented to the clients. They all valued having their business challenges analyzed and worked on by people outside of their organizations, enabling them to get new ideas and perspectives on the challenges. They were all impressed by what could be accomplished in just 24 hours and all expressed the wish to participate in future hackathons.

Feel free to check out a short video we made about the whole event:

The hackathon was a great experience for everyone. The team effort, the possibility to work with colleagues you normally don’t work with as well as the need to familiarize yourself with new technology and areas that are new to you – they all tie in to our company culture, Competence, Passion and Business focus – KAP as we say in Swedish.

Do you want your own hackathon mixing your own employees with our development teams – reach out to us and let’s make it happen!

We look forward to organizing more hackathons in the future, both our own – and why not one with you? Do you want your own hackathon mixing your own employees with our development teams – reach out to us and let’s make it happen! We can promise an unforgettable experience.

Special thanks go out to our clients Haldex, Region Skåne and Scandinavian Cosmetics, to all our employees who participated in the hackathon, our judges and the organizing team.