Creating the Perfect Challenge for Your Hackathon

Creating impactful challenges is key to a successful hackathon, and in this chapter, you will learn how to do this while engaging your audience, employees, and partners at the same time.

We will be using the Dream for Sweden and Dream for Earth campaigns as examples in this chapter. During the course of this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• How to create a great challenge that serves your purpose
• The challenge categories – a framework for exploration
• Inviting your audience to find the right challenges
• Learnings of the dream campaigns
• What signifies a great challenge?

Throughout this chapter, you will embark on a step-by-step journey to master the art of crafting challenges with a sharp edge, aimed at yielding solutions that encapsulate real impact. You’ll delve into how the essence of citizen-driven innovation is rooted in the creation of challenges, and comprehend how to transform...

How to create a great challenge that serves your purpose

Much like how the framing of a question influences its answer, the way a hackathon challenge is presented shapes the outcome of the hackathon. A well-defined challenge directs participants toward targeted innovation, ensuring that solutions are not only relevant but also aligned with the hackathon’s goals. By specifying the scope and objectives clearly, organizers channel participants’ creativity and expertise into generating impactful and actionable solutions. This strategic approach maximizes the event’s effectiveness, turning the challenge into a catalyst for focused problem-solving and meaningful innovation.

Crafting effective hackathon challenges – building the foundation of innovation

When orchestrating a hackathon, the creation of challenges stands as a pivotal cornerstone, wielding an immense influence over the event’s outcomes. These challenges aren’t just prompts; they...

The challenge categories – a framework for exploration

Dividing challenges into categories isn’t just organizational; it’s strategic. By categorizing challenges under distinct themes—such as water, health, or environment—the hackathon creators strategically channel participants’ efforts toward specialized problem domains. This segmentation ensures a deliberate and concentrated approach, allowing teams to delve deep into specific sectors while fostering collaboration and diversity of solutions.

Each category acts as a canvas for innovation, inviting participants to unleash their creativity within well-defined spheres. The choice of categories itself plays a crucial role in inspiring teams, aligning with societal concerns, and catalyzing impactful solutions.

In essence, the creation of hackathon challenges transcends a mere selection of prompts; it’s a meticulous art form that shapes the hackathon’s ethos, defines its objectives...

Inviting your audience to find the right challenges

As mentioned before, a hackathon is only as good as its challenges. The challenges will determine the outcome of the hackathon, and that is why the creation of the challenges is of utmost importance.

Creating the challenges is also an opportunity to engage your audience and an excellent way to begin the hackathon journey. By inviting your audience to take part in the creation of the challenges, you at the same time show them that you value their opinion and perspective. You can also get invaluable insights into the challenges perceived at different levels of your organization, insights that you may not have learned about before. These insights may be of utmost importance to improve your organization’s overall functioning, so incorporating them into the challenges in the hackathon is a very good way of addressing them purposefully.

Many people don’t know what a hackathon is or why they should join one. To communicate...

Learnings of the Dream for Sweden and Dream for Earth campaigns

The dream campaigns so far executed have shown that citizens want to contribute to the creation of challenges in hackathons and that sharing their dreams can be one way of evoking an interest in joining a hackathon with an audience that doesn’t necessarily think of themselves as hackathon-goers. The purpose of the dream campaigns was to open up the hackathon to a more diverse group of people who can contribute to it and its challenges, drawing in a more diverse group of participants too. The results of the dream campaigns show that people of all ages and many different parts of the world are interested in contributing to solutions for a better future and that you can benefit from inviting citizens to be involved in challenge creation. The dream campaigns reached many people and served their purpose as PR for the hackathons as well. It is also a good way of engaging your partner community in creating the challenges...

What signifies a great challenge

The essence of a great challenge is to balance scope, clarity, and creativity. A truly great challenge isn’t just a prompt; it’s a catalyst that ignites passion, fuels creativity, and drives innovation. Crafting such a challenge requires finesse, where each word holds immense weight and clarity reigns supreme. Within the realm of hackathons and problem-solving ventures, the definition of a “great” challenge is multidimensional, encompassing aspects of comprehension, scope, and creativity.

One hallmark of a great challenge lies in its simplicity and clarity. The challenge statement should be concise and devoid of unnecessary jargon or intricate language that could lead to misinterpretation. When participants read the challenge, they should instantly grasp its essence without confusion. It’s an art form to articulate complex ideas in a few words, maintaining a balance between brevity and depth, where the challenge...

Summary

In this chapter, we covered how to create challenges with a sharp edge and pointed at delivering solutions that embody the right level of potential for impact. We covered how you can invite your audience and community to co-create challenges. This was exemplified by two examples of dream campaigns, illustrating how challenges can be created through actively engaging with your employees, customers, and partner organizations. The importance of communication and community-driven activities were highlighted, creating challenges that will be appealing to the hacker teams and also produce the high-quality solutions you need. This chapter also covered specific examples of challenges used in Hack for Earth hackathons. These examples and the descriptions of the two examples of dream campaigns serve as hands-on lessons for readers to create challenges on their own.

In the next chapter, you will learn about the Hack! phase in the Dream! Hack! Build! methodology, taking you through...