Why Hackathons are Awesome for AEC

I attended the AEC Hackathon in Copenhagen, Denmark this past weekend.  Held at BLOXHUB, an innovation center built on Copenhagen Harbor, the event featured over 100 professionals from the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry.  At the conclusion of the event, I marvelled at the depth, relevancy, and creativity of the projects created during the weekend by teams. In order to support both BLOXHUB and AEC Hackathon, I wanted to provide my insight on the value of hackathons and how it was demonstrated at BLOXHUB this weekend.

MVP Thinking

Startups all over the world are familiar with the concept of a Minimum Viable Product, or MVP.  During hackathons, participants have only a few days to conceive, plan, and execute on a new technical product or service that supports the AEC industry. This naturally limits the scope of projects and executes an MVP-like approach.  Participants prune out all features not necessary to demonstrate their product or service because of the time constraint. This focuses the value of the innovation, so we can concisely imagine how we can change the AEC industry.

Crowd-shared Product Definition

At hackathons, participants form and pick teams at the start of the event.  This means people get to pick their project based on their interests and skills.  In software, the definition of products and services is critical because it describes the alignment of functionality and value.  Product definition during hackathons is structurally unique for two key reasons. First, people pick their own team so they are expressing their interest and relevant expertise.  This creates a team of people who are deeply engaged in the value of the innovation. Second, features have a high “cost” due to the lack of time, which means feature selection is very important for the team.  This means the features are consensus-driven, which drives a featureset that maximizes value. Product definition in “normal” practice occurs lots of different ways. But hackathons organically and naturally define products and services at a very high quality because of the engaged, motivated, crowd-shared hackathon process.

Knowledge & Skill Sharing

Hackathon participants come from different backgrounds and skill sets. This exposes people to new ways of “hacking” AEC processes.  Often, AEC professionals can define an approach to achieve a desired result, but don’t know how to technically deliver a given solution.  At Copenhagen, several teams weren’t aware of the power of the development platform from Unity Technologies. But there were two sources of expertise on Unity available for teams - 1) other practicing professionals who used Unity in their work and 2) the experts from Unity who were attending the event.  The result was a majority of teams who used the fast development process of Unity to create solutions.

Torben Klitgaard led his BLOXHUB team as hosts of the AECHackathon - Copenhagen. They did an incredible job.

Summary

I had an amazing experience at BLOXHUB and the AECHackathon in Copenhagen.  I’ll be following up with thoughts that describe the impact of BLOXHUB for the city of Copenhagen and the country of Denmark but the weekend once again reminded me why hackathons are important for the AEC industry.  

Greg Howes and Damon Hernandez were in Copenhagen and provide leadership and organization for AECHackathon.