You pitched your ideas to the Hackathon judges. You may have won an award. What comes next in the commercialisation process?
Here we offer guidance on how to commercialise innovations from a Hackathon. How do you take your brilliant innovation conceived through a Hackathon to market?
Commercialisation – building on the Hackathon
So how do you take a Hackathon innovation project to market? Here are just some of the very first steps we recommend.
- Leverage the connections you made at the Hackathon among the teams, mentors, and judges. Take advantage of consulting services included in the awards.
- Start writing a Learning Diary to record your reflections. What would you do differently in hindsight?
- Create a 2-3 page project brief. We think this is a real make or break step in successful execution and a precursor to a strategic business plan.
- What additional customer insights do you need that will validate your assumptions and strengthen your business model?
- Formulate a basic spreadsheet identifying likely start-ups costs. Ask the mentors or other start-ups to give you ballpark figures. How much does it cost to incorporate, pay an accountant to file a corporate tax return, general liability insurance, registered patents, trademarks and domain names? This will enable you to be realistic when applying for start-up funding. How long will it be before you gain any revenue and so when could you break-even?
We were delighted to contribute to the Hackathon business boot camp, which built upon our 10 tips to win a Hackathon post. Opencity Inc. is, in fact, my fourth start-up since the age of 17.
GENYSIS scoop Hackathon awards
The $100,000 worth of awards at the Kitchener-Waterloo Hackathon were divided among 5 teams
- EasyTalk – Peoples’ Choice Award
- Geronto.IOT & Project AI – IBM Award
- Alphaway – Agfa Healthcare Award, Best Clinical Project & Desjardins Award
- GENYSIS – HH Judges’ Favourite plus 7 others including CC-ABHI Award, OpenSky Incubator Award, Best Patient Project, Signal UX Award, Highest Potential Impact, PointClickCare Award & CareAcademy Award
Here the GENYSIS team of Jay Bamimore, Cheryl Ip, and Catherine Park, share their immediate reaction to winning the Hackathon. GENYSIS is a web-based platform that connects Service Seekers to Providers through an online marketplace.
The standard of all the pitches was excellent. I was very impressed with the well thought out and articulated business plan pitched by Project AI. I tweeted that EasyTalk may win an award by virtue of simplicity.
“We are a country of immigrants”, said EasyTalk
Recommended reads
Through the Hackathon, we recommended a number of business books, in addition to the excellent Simon Simek Golden Circle Start with Why video.
- Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur
- New Strategic Selling by Robert Miller & Stephen Heiman
- Hacking Marketing by Scott Brinker
- Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario (RNAO) – Nursing Best Practice Guidelines (BPG) covering areas that include Falls, Delirium, Dementia and Depression, Pain & Pressure Injuries.
Hackathon – Brain Health, Aging & Wellness
“We’re all aging. We’re all trying to stay healthy and technology is around us constantly, so why not use it to benefit where we’re going,” co-organiser Sara Bingham told CBC Kitchener-Waterloo
Congratulations to the Hacking Health Kitchener-Waterloo organising committee who delivered a great 1st Hackathon. The headline sponsors were The Canadian Centre for Aging and Brain Health Innovation & Agfa HealthCare. The weekend also coincided with Hackathons in both Lyon, France and Londrina, Brazil. We really like the Sparkboard tool used by the teams to post their projects. It is also in early limited beta testing.
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