Lviv IT Cluster is a community of IT companies, authorities, and educational institutions determined to work on the development of the IT sphere and our region through education, promotion of the industry (city, region, companies), and infrastructure.
Business Challenge
Hack the New World was the first online hackathon organized by IT Arena, in cooperation with the Lviv Tech Angels investor club and local IT company. The hackathon aimed to find effective tech solutions for the post-crisis period, which would be implemented in Lviv, Ukraine with support of the Lviv City Council. From May 15-17, 2020, 181 participants, 24 mentors, and 16 judges united efforts to look for solutions that could help businesses in the post-quarantine period.
The purpose of hackathons is to solve challenges with external skills and resources, it’s what inbound open innovation is all about. A public hackathon is a powerful way to generate value-driven ideas by bringing out the competitive spirit of internal or external stakeholders. Implementing a contest with clearly-established parameters within a set period of time can incentivise hackathon participants to solve problems and co-create submissions for new products, services, and process improvements.
Due to COVID-19 quarantines IT Arena’s hackathon participant collaboration and ideation needed to be conducted through an online platform that would facilitate remote collaboration, discussion, and voting.
Project Description
SoftServe Innovation Platform is an innovation portfolio management software that empowers organizations to turn innovation into a systematic process through an end-to-end success framework of crowdsourced ideation during workshop, hackathon, discovery or innovation initiative. Tool supports teams during their ‘IDEATE’ stage, when they generate, select, and vote on ideas at scale. It then helps to build hypotheses and test them in an ‘ITERATE’ stage. And finally, the platform allows teams to track the execution progress of any MVPs that were initiated in the ‘DELIVER’ stage.
SoftServe partnered with Hack the New World Hackathon to provide the Innovation Platform as the single place for ideation, selection, and voting on ideas. SoftServe’s Innovation CoE team supported organizers with the process and tool set-up for the online hackathon.
Value Delivered
SoftServe Innovation Platform was used as single place to store all ideas, idea related artifacts, and final presentations; as well as a place for the judges to vote and select winners.
Hackathon organizers created ten different well defined problem challenges, for which participants submitted 30 ideas. Participants formed teams based on ideas and related conversations. All submissions were reviewed and judged by a panel of 16 experts – who selected 13 ideas for a final pitch, and eventually defined three ideas as winners, which would be developed after the Hackathon. The progress of idea implementation is all tracked within the Innovation Platform.
