On 9-10 April we run the first Athens InnoJam competition. We were more than happy to have 17 students and young graduates competing for 30 straight hours! Our innovatorts formed 3 teams and competed on a challenge regarding Public Sector.
For the first 6 hours, they followed a Design Thinking session, delivered by our DT experts, where each team reached it's final solution. I have to say that this was a trully interesting procedure... Ideas succeeded eachother, team members were brainstorming, new approaches fell on the table, nascent innovation!
When all had decided on what they want to build, a 24 hour coding marathon started for the developers of each team. Caffeine consumption really peaked...
On the second day, the business people of each team followed an Entrepreneurship workshop, where they had to build their "company's" marketing plan, while developers were still coding, and coding, and coding.... :wink: . Needless to say that during all this procedure, our IT experts were next to our developers, helping them and supporting them on everything they needed and wanted to ask.
After 30 hours, the competition was over. The teams pitched their ideas and what they had already build to our judging panel and 1 hour later, we had a winner! The team from Harokopio University, with the participation of 1 student from University of Piraeus and 1 student from the Technical Institution of Athens, won with a trully interesting idea about rationalizing bureaucracy and queues reduction at public services.
Did the procedure ended at this point? Of course not! The winning team visited SAP offices for 30 days, working with our HANA experts to finalize their prototype. First destination: Netherlands on 8-9 May. Our winners just returned from Hague, where they had a slot to present their idea during the International Summit for Public Services, before 500 participants! And our support will be ongoing.
From my side I would like to thank all participants who joined this competition and the 2 HANA workshops which preceded. I am very excited because I had the oportunity to meet with trully interesting people, be involved in Innovation and Entrepreneurship procedures and of course, have fun! Really looking forward to our next University Alliances event!
