Nationwide's first external hackathon returns a bevy of innovative ideas
Ahead of the event, we knew it was a sell-out, but we didn’t know exactly what that would mean.
As a larger insurance and financial services company, Nationwide loves to do cool things. No, seriously.
And we know cool things often come from hackathons — an innovation-focused event that invites designers, programmers and entrepreneurs from all walks life together to create concepts to help address a particular challenge.
Sure, we here at Nationwide had done plenty of things internally that produced some really good stuff, but would it make sense to invite complete strangers to tackle challenges to help our members? They don’t know much about our company and almost nothing about the complexities of insurance and financial services. Would we be willing to try solutions that weren’t identified through the traditional ways we do things?
As part of our Innovation@Nationwide effort, we gave it a shot.
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A hack of an idea
About a year ago, Erik Ross, who leads Nationwide’s venture capital investments in innovation, and I proposed that Nationwide should host a hackathon on the West Coast. Our partners at Plug and Play tech centers offered their location and connected us with an event coordinator, Angel Hack, which made it easy for us to manage logistics and marketing of an event 2,500 miles away. The excitement was high back in Ohio and a team of us were in Sunnyvale, Calif. to support, sponsor, observe and learn from our first external hackathon.
Ahead of the event, we knew it was a sell-out, but we didn’t know exactly what that would mean. We had 111 eager, caffeinated hackers show up ready to develop novel ideas on Saturday morning. They learned about three business challenges we asked them to focus on. Twenty-eight hours later, 25 teams pitched their solutions that really highlighted the creativity that came together. We evaluated all of them and by 5 p.m. Sunday the winners had been named, group photos had been taken, and we sang the oh-so-catchy “On Your Side” jingle with the grand prize-winning team on stage. Speaking for the team that was there, the event exceeded our expectations.
Some registered as teams ahead of the event, others joined a team that first morning. Nationwide hosted expert-led breakouts for each of the challenges after lunch and our team on-site answered questions throughout. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was another partner, and there were no issues with the cloud or the Nationwide APIs our hackers used to help bring their ideas to life.
We saw a more diverse crowd than we had expected. There were hackers who needed an ID to prove they were at least 18, and hackers that had already spent a career doing something other than hacking. We had many hackers from Silicon Valley but also ones who traveled from places like New York and even Singapore. There were hackers who worked for big tech companies and others who were independent. We weren’t surprised that our hackers were mostly men, but happy to see many women.
In a few weeks, the four winning teams will come to Columbus, Ohio and re-pitch those ideas to other Nationwide executives at our corporate headquarters. Between now and then, we’ll be reaching out to the other teams that had at least something in an idea that we hadn’t seen or thought of before.
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And the winner is…
There’s no crystal ball to understand which or how many might turn into Nationwide products or services, but our Members should be confident that we’re serious about figuring out how to serve them in ways they haven’t begun to imagine.
Our overall award winner translated our challenge to “help Millennials buy their first home” into a platform business model where individuals can connect with like-minded people who would like to build home equity but aren’t ready to do that on their own. The team thought through design elements that would avoid bias and discrimination, embedded social engagement, and defined a business system where equity could move with the platform participants. This team took the opportunity to turn an important issue for a large part of our country, and envisioned a business model… in a day.
Since the overall winner focused on the millennial home-buying challenge, we had a challenge-winner around this topic, too. That team had a completely different focus that used unique and appropriately gamified data visualization with embedded digital advice and frictionless paths to act on those recommendations. Those are all great design features with easy-to-use tools. This team also made everyone laugh with a right-sized tone of humor that makes their solution that much more engaging.
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Ideas for members and communities
Nationwide’s focus on helping connected businesses received the attention of a few hacking teams, and we saw many different takes on how that could show up in a market. The winning team developed an on-demand feedback solution for small businesses and used cognitive and machine learning techniques to aggregate actionable insights for business owners accessible through Alexa, of course.
We were very excited about the final challenge. We asked the teams to design a solution that would help communities help themselves when disasters strike — we called it “Community On Your Side.”
In this case, our winner created a Nationwide Buddy System that defined a unique spin around volunteerism using geo-location and multiple data sources to effectively match resources and needs. We were happy to see in all the projects around this category that teams understood Nationwide isn’t just interested in making our processes more efficient. We were looking for ideas to help us be there for our members — and their communities — when it matters most.
We awarded the cash prizes and the participants took home some company-branded swag that we hope helped to express our appreciation for their time, effort and creativity. Eric and my team members worked hard to make the event so successful, and we certainly have tried to make sure they know how valuable they are. And we definitely couldn’t have accomplished it without our partners. I think we might change a few little things for the next time, but it’s hard to imagine if this event could go any better than it did. With a hackathon for about 300 Nationwiders scheduled for July in Columbus, I think there will be continued excitement around Innovation@Nationwide. Stay tuned!
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Seth Flory is the vice president of technology innovation & strategy for Nationwide. He can be reached at seth.flory@nationwide.com.