Hackathons are more popular among small to medium companies. It became popular among large enterprises after companies like Facebook demonstrated huge success with these programs. Facebook employees came up with lots of interesting ideas which was later shipped to customers. Microsoft also had hackathons which were organized by different divisions at different locations. But this year, Microsoft is making their ever companywide exercise in growth hacking.
This hackthon is a key part of //oneweek, which is CEO Satya Nadella’s effort to reinvent the way the company does business and to encourage the rise of brilliant ideas no matter where they originate. //Oneweek includes several events such as a company forum on Monday where leadership will set priorities for the year, the hackathon on Tuesday and Wednesday, and a Product Fair on Wednesday and Thursday.
Senior leadership, in planning this week’s events, wanted to “kick off the new fiscal year in a new way,” said Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Communications. “We wanted to have a week-long celebration that was global in nature, as opposed to a single, Redmond-based activity that was streamed globally. We wanted to make sure that we combined the Product Fair in with the rest of the activities. And more importantly, we wanted to have a hackathon that the entire company could participate in.” The hackathon being open to everyone at the company is also meant to encourage fresh ideas.“It’s easy to think that a hackathon, or growth hacking, is for specific subsets of our employee base,” Shaw said. “But if you look at what it means to be a growth hacker, it applies to people in marketing, finance, engineering and sales too. We all have the opportunity to think really creatively about doing things differently in some really interesting ways.”
Read more about it and couple of projects that will be on hackathon from the link below.
Source: microsoft
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