As a business leader in the data and digital space, your days are probably filled with dashboards, project plans, strategy decks, and postmortems. These tools are vital. They distil performance into visuals and align teams around goals. However, the sheer formality of these tools can get in the way of understanding the necessary messiness of innovation.
What if, instead, you could eavesdrop on innovation as it happens? Listening to your teams while they innovate is one of the most underused superpowers in the CDO’s toolkit. That’s where hackathons come in.
The value of understanding the discovery process
Hackathons are often seen as the playground of developers, data scientists, and tech tinkerers. Increasingly, though, they are now the R&D labs for enterprise innovation. They allow diverse teams to coalesce for a limited time period to consider a real problem, explore cutting-edge tools and test hypotheses.
What matters here is not just the outputs, but the process itself. If you listen in on a hackathon team at work, you can hear how they are framing the business problem. You can see what tools are useful (and which ones are not). You can also see patterns: repeated frustrations with certain datasets, or surprising new insights drawn from overlooked sources. Crucially, you see discovery in its purest form, before it is packaged into a pitch or slide deck—and that in itself can provide some very interesting insights into business processes.
In the 2024 SAS Hackathon, teams addressed a wide range of business problems, including optimising the healthcare workforce to match staffing levels to patient flow, using digital twin technology to mitigate power outages in utility companies, and using a no-code approach to detect anomalies in insurance claims data to reduce potential fraud.
Lessons from the coalface
These examples are all highly business- and industry-specific. However, they had two things in common. The first is that these teams were all solving problems that mattered to customers, regulators, or frontline workers. The second is that the tools they chose were not necessarily the high-tech, flashy options. Instead, they were the ones that made exploration faster, such as no-code interfaces, real-time analytics, and collaborative workspaces.
For CDOs, these choices are instructive. They reveal what your teams gravitate toward when the guardrails are temporarily lifted. They show which problems matter most, and which technologies are becoming indispensable. However, why does that matter to businesses?
The answer lies in a hackathon’s potential to spark change. These events give teams a chance to experiment without fear of punishment or corporate controls. And sometimes, these small experiments can spark big changes in thinking.
Supporting success
What can CDOs learn from the hackathon process about how to encourage innovation? Here are some ideas to help both within and beyond the hackathon experience.
- Encourage exploration—but steer teams towards areas of value
Give your teams the permission and protection to explore, but steer them towards high-value areas. For example, encourage them to focus on known friction points in the customer journey, operational inefficiencies, or regulatory challenges. Innovation thrives within boundaries.
- Track insights, not just outputs
Encourage teams to document what they build, but also what they learn. Ask them what surprised them, and what didn’t work, as well as what did. Find out which tools made things work quicker. This creates a knowledge base that can outlive the immediate innovation process.
- Look beyond the prototype stage
Too often, good ideas do not get beyond the prototype stage. Make sure that your innovation efforts also include a “production path” team of engineers, architects, and product managers to focus on moving promising concepts from prototype to pilot. They will need to be involved from the beginning to ensure that ideas are built in a way that makes scaling-up feasible.
- Focus on storytelling as well as solving problems
Even the best technical solutions need champions. Encourage teams to frame their solutions in business terms, to describe the metric that improves, or the risk that is mitigated. This helps to ensure that their efforts appeal directly to your peers in the C-suite.
Reaping the cultural dividend
Listening to the hackathon process also tells you something important about your organisational culture. You can find out whether teams collaborate across silos, and if more junior staff feel able to contribute ideas. You can also get an insight into whether people use the tools you’ve invested in, or find workarounds, and how ideas evolve in your organisation.
These signals are priceless. They tell you whether your teams feel safe to explore, whether your technology stack empowers or frustrates, and whether people are working towards or around your strategy.
As one participant in the 2024 SAS Hackathon put it: “The hackathon gave us the freedom to do what we always wished we could”. That’s the kind of insight no dashboard will show you.
See innovation in motion. Join the SAS Hackathon Boot Camp for a hands-on experience that brings people together to collaborate, experiment and apply data and AI using SAS® Viya®.
