Innovation Hackathon

Co-creating a disuptive, 'Kaizen' culture in your organisation

1-day Hackathon from £5/per person per day (min 100 people)

Do you want to generate more innovation in your organisation?

Hire us to facilitate a 1-day event to bring out the best of your team, department or company.

Engagement

Innovation is key to survival in tomorrow's world, yet levels of engagement in most organisations is low. How can we unleash latent creativity, create products, solve problems and drive productivity?

Invitation

You can't force innovation, you have to create the conditions for it. Staff need to be motivated, engaged in the purpose of the organisation, and free to play and experiment in a supportive culture.

Culture

Many organisations' culture is hampered by tired and stifling practices and hierarchy. We can free up and unblock your collective ingenuity, at scale, in a short and cost efficient burst.

What is blocking innovation? How can we make our workplace more innovative?

"If you want to produce something truly innovative and useful, you cannot know - by definition - where to go. That's why leading innovation is not - and cannot be - about being a visionary. The last thing you want is a team that defers to you to set a course... If your goal is innovation, then your role must instead be to create an environment - a setting, a context, an organisation - where people are willing and able to do the hard work of innovation themselves: to collaborate, learn through trial and error, and make integrated decisions."
- Linda Hall, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove and Kent Linebeck, Collective Genius

Open Space enables this collaborative innovation - at scale across teams and departments.

We invite you to participate in a cross-functional conversation exploring change in your workplace to be more innovative: an Innovation Hackathon day.

"Open Space is a party for ideas."
- Colin Newlyn, participant at Caterfly's Shift event.

How it works

You can't magically transform your organisation and its culture by wishful thinking. However, you can kick-start the process, while addressing your Burning Issue.

In our 'Innovation Hackathon Day', everyone in the organisation, department or section is invited to play and get creative around a theme based on your needs and your context.

Participation is optional, cross-functional and fun. We use an 'Open Space' format to harness the power of self-organisation, with everyone free to follow their enthusiasm in pursuit of the goal.

Invitation-based innovation

"Co-creation by the 'diversity of many' is an absolute best practice. People own what they help create. Every time you ask people to adopt something they haven't contributed to, you waste resources and undermine engagement". - Sanofi Pasteur, Head of Quality Innovation and Engagement (in The
Employee Engagement Alliance)

That's why everyone across the organisation should be engaged in co-creation.

An innovation culture

This is not about innovation techniques. It is about creating the right conditions for an innovation culture to thrive.

An innovation culture which is conducive to people being innovative and being willing to share their ideas and solutions.

Our one day event can't do all that on its own, but it can support a deeper impetus and a broader programme, or be the starting point - in a bite-sized, 'suck it and see' trial, with immediate results.

Potential applications

Solve a problem together

'Crowd-source' your burning issue, utilising the collective intelligence in your organisation or team. People are brilliant. We create the conditions for their ingenuity to be unleashed. Suitable for large, complex, multi-faceted problems that can't be fixed alone, or for which it would be futile to try to solve at the top, and see it scuppered by reality as it cascades down and throughout the workforce.

Create or develop products, policies or strategy

Amazing things can happen when we invite everyone to self-organise around areas of interest beyond the usual team or department 'silos'. Our process creates a real buzz and gets the juices flowing.

Redesign your organisation

"There is something inherently contradictory about using authoritarian means to implement a management model aimed at enhancing self-determination and innovation." - Gary Hamel, LBS professor. What we need are Innovation platforms. You can't do it all in one day, but you can make a dramatic start. Re-program, re-imagine, re-purpose, re-wire for a modern, organic business fit for 21st Century needs.

Develop organisational Kaizen

Invite staff to make improvements to their role or products, and cultivate the conditions for ongoing, continuous innovation and development.

Deep dialogue

What many organisations are missing is humble inquiry and sincere, respectful listening. It is not what leaders say, but what they do that will have a great impact on the organisation. Instigate a listening and discussion process to get to the root of the issues affecting you.

Design Thinking Transformation

A design-driven organisation is always thinking about its customers, empathizing with end users, and trying to solve problems while keeping it's customers in mind with real data coming from users. Design thinking helps to create a more responsive, agile, customer-led organisation.

Introduce change, get buy-in

For a deeper, long-lived and effective transformation, or to introduce a new system, process or culture a shift is needed in the way we introduce change. Rather than asking or telling staff to engage with someone else's plan, we use this process to invite everyone affected to co-create their own plan, together. The results can be quite surprising.

Interested?

No obligation, let's start a conversation about your needs. Please click on the link below. We'll ask you some questions to better understand your needs, we'll get back to you shortly after and take it from there.

Benefits

* Increased energy in organisation * Greater open transparency * More cross-border communications * Focus on creating value for end users * Increased innovation throughout

Scale

An Open Space-based Innovation Hackathon hosted by Caterfly can be run for 10 - 5,000 people simultaneously, depending on space available. The more people from different sections of the organisation, the more diversity, the richer and more fruitful the outcome is likely to be.

Cost

Guide price: £5 per participant, minimum 100 ≈ £500 for day (e.g. 300 people would cost £1,500) at your venue - venue rental and food/drink not included. Negotiable. The main cost to you is in getting all participants together for a highly focused day. This is designed to be a low risk, efficient and effective investment that is relatively simple to instigate and deliver.

Let's start

Please complete the form by clicking on the button below, so that we can better understand your needs, and we'll get back to you shortly after.

Why 'Hackathon'?

A Hackathon is a term used for a gathering together of people in a short, intense explosion of creativity to collaboratively solve a problem. Most commonly used in software programming, a 'hacking marathon' might create new products or fix issues. The phrase 'culture hacking' is also being used to describe people hacking - fixing or improving - company culture.

What is 'Open Space'?

A method for facilitating gatherings of people from small to very large around a common theme, using the principle of self-organisation. Its applications have been numerous and extremely diverse, but it is under-employed in organisations where it is rarely on the radar.

What is 'Kaizen'?

Kaizen is a Japanese term meaning continuous improvement. It is closely associated with an attitude and processes at the heart of Japanese management practice and organisational culture, especially automotive engineering and 'The Toyota Way', from which Lean and Agile approaches sprung. It has been claimed that Kaizen was fundamental to the post war Japanese economic boom. Kaizen invites us to continually strive to improve every aspect of how we work and what we make.