I’ve written about how Hackathons are a key intrapreneurial activity and route to innovation which includes various approaches I’ve adopted. I’ve captured how I’ve used my adventures helping customers adopt some of those approaches to good effect and to disrupt their innovation efforts. I’ve also published a guide on running them: Running effective hackathons (paid for).

As you might tell, I’m a keen proponent of and participant in Hackathons. I’ve won before, but I don’t measure success in the winning. It’s much more about the participation and skills and friendships you build.

Prominent Hackathon’s I participated in were run by Microsoft. In 2014 Satya Nadella became CEO and made them a thing: This is not your father’s Microsoft. Here they are listed in reverse chronological order:

1. AkwaLife – 2023
2. Journey – 2018
3. SuccessGo – 2014

AkwaLife – 2023

This was a blockbuster year: 53,723 registrants; 76,614 participants and 15,982 projects. My team didn’t win this year but the experience and learning was the greatest of all.

In this hack, which I lead, there were 14 of us. I’ve written about my experience in detail here: Hackathon as growth lab and how to lead a hack. Below is a little more about the hack in the overview we provided and at left is the submission video.

Good quality drinking water is essential for our health and deteriorating so trust in tap water is declining, leading to unsustainable outcomes e.g. more plastic bottle use and in the environment​​.

As the quality of our drinking water is impacted by increasing factors (chemicals, plastics, biohazards, etc.), consumers have no way of easily verifying the quality of the water they drink once it leaves the source and arrives at their taps.

Through our innovative digital platform based on Microsoft technologies, we collect, analyse and provide seamless access to real-time water quality data based on location. By bridging technology with health and environmental awareness, we strive to safeguard and inspire a collective commitment to water purity and sustainability.

Journey – 2018

This year I participated with two other colleagues and we submitted a separate hack in a local two day Hackathon in the UK and won. That allowed us to go on to participate in the global one week Hackathon in Seattle later in the year – the feature image of this post is from one of the main tents.

There we came second amongst the hacks submitted in our category out of over 23000 hackers worldwide that submitted over 5000 hacks. Although three of us formally worked on and submitted the hack, we had upwards of 15 involved at any time and many more in Microsoft interested and supporting us.

The idea for all this started before I left Microsoft and I took it back up upon returning. I wrote a post on LinkedIn detailing its origins on a piece of work with a customer.

We called it Journey and here is a video with a demo of what was submitted and won.

SuccessGo – 2014

Back in 2014, three of us took part and won at the local Science Fair in the UK which was a part of the global hackathon. We developed an app for customer success managers (CSM’s). We called it SuccessGo because it was a mobile app for CSM’s, on the go.

Built on Dynamics, it focused on allowing CSM’s to capture success events, that is, interactions with or by customers that might have an impact on usage and could be mapped against a usage report, explained here. It also covered success stories that could be shared on Yammer.

The purpose was to share learning of what led to successes as well as have a searchable database. Check out a demo of the app at left. This has to a large part been built into current applications.