Beyond The Covid-19 Hackathons: Matchathons

During the past three months, a global series of hackathons emerged to find solutions for Covid-19 related challenges. The first Covid-19 related hackathon emerged in mid-March 2020 in Estonia. Since then, over 67 hackathons have been mobilized across the world.

One of the key concerns of both hackathon organizers and participants is to generate impact in a timely fashion; in other words, to not only generate ideas but to develop solutions that could result in real products or services. It’s not a new concern. Despite enthusiastic discussions about open innovation contests in the corporate sector, organizations rarely use hackathons as a stand-alone innovation practice. They often need to be combined with other practices to produce a result that actually gets to market.

Taking this into account, online market mechanisms called “matchathons” have emerged to connect hackathon projects with end users, investors, foundations and other funding opportunities. The month of May saw two matchathons take place. The first took place on May 14-15th, and was organized as a follow-up to the Global Hack-a global hackathon that took place in April. The second matchathon, organized by the European Commission, took place on May 22-25th, to match 120 winning projects arising out of the #EUvsVirus hackathon to 458 potential partners across both public and private sectors. Both events operated as online speed-dating mechanisms whereby projects and interested parties were matched for further meetings and conversations. According to a report published by the European Commission, the #EUvsVirus matchathon resulted in all teams having at least 12 partnerships from different sectors to help develop their projects.

While it’s still early to evaluate whether the matchathon mechanism will directly result in products that get to market, all parties consider it a step in the right direction. Participants, in particular, focused on the benefits of efficiency. As Arbob Mehmood of Solocoin describes in the European Commission report, “it helped us to meet people, create collaboration and partnership opportunities with amazing people in just three days which might have taken a year to accomplish.”

Apart from these large-scale matchathons, national and local initiatives are working to embed hackathons into existing local innovation initiatives.

Consider the example of Luxembourg. By chance, Hackthecrisis Luxembourg took place a week before a deadline for startups to submit Covid-19 related projects to Luxembourg’s Ministry of Economy for possible funding. Philippe Linster, CEO of House of Startups Luxembourg, who co-organized the hackathon explains, “some startups were able to test their ideas with mentors and peers during the general hackathon before submitting their application to the Ministry funded project. It was perfect synergy and collaboration.” 

In Nigeria, Binta Moustapha, who is passionate about promoting STEM for women in West Africa, led the organization of Hack the Crisis Nigeria. According to Moustapha, “The first challenge we faced in Nigeria was to create awareness about Covid-19 in multiple local languages such as Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo, in addition to English. So many people were interested in providing solutions for this.” Winning teams have access to consulting and advisory services, and projects can be submitted to the national innovation challenge that is spearheaded by the Nigerian Information Technology Development Agency.

In Turkey, Emre Erbirer of ATÖLYE, a creative services organization and Mustafa Ozer of imece, a social innovation platform, who co-organized Hack the Crisis Turkey  in partnership with ara studio, took it upon themselves to follow-up directly with hackathon participants. “Following the hackathon, our three organizations thought about how we could develop other mechanisms to help solutions with the potential to scale, and how we could find more resources to support them,” explains Ozer. Erbirer adds, “We also recommended that some projects combine their efforts so we did matchmaking between projects and then we introduced them to our larger ecosystem.”                                                                                                                                                           Ensuring that these initiatives are viewed, not only through scale of growth, but also through the lens of impact is important. Embedding these hackathons into the broader innovation system to ensure implementation is key.