Thinking and acting outside the lines in a hackathon

Hospital Tergooi organized the hackathon to help employees to get to know each other better. And to inspire them to eliminate bottlenecks in their health care work, in just one day. We used ‘design coaching’ to share our knowledge of innovation processes and design thinking techniques.

In creative processes, the challenge is not to come up with ideas. There’s more than enough of them. The real challenge is to think of a solution for the real problem, often enough ‘the problem behind the problem’. A solution that’s easy to implement and works well for the end user. In the hackathon, it’s important not to stay discussing ideas, but to quickly visualize them, in order to test them quickly. All in one day, isn’t that exciting?

In the hackathon five teams each received their own theme and a digital brainstorming platform. On the platform they found clear steps to take, and templates to first really focus on the problem at hand, and to come up with solutions (according to the ‘double diamond’ process). Sometimes the design coach had to hit the brakes (‘which problem are we solving here?’) or had to accelerate (just draw your idea’).

One of the goals was to let the employees get acquainted better. That certainly worked out. After the hackathon they all swapped their contact info, to more easily find each other in the future. Furthermore, some beautiful ideas were born. To improve ‘therapy loyalty’ for patients that use medications, they designed ‘motivation moments’. Another idea: a communal dossier for vulnerable elderly patients, connected to a smart watch that shows vital data.