Following up the award-winning teams

After the hackathon, members of winning teams worked on their projects as volunteers. Teams 1 and 4 met regularly and advanced their ideas significantly. Team 1 developed their specification for a headlamp and received generous support from a medium-sized enterprise to build a prototype. However, that prototype did not meet all necessary design criteria, and the team was unable to reiterate to overcome certain technological difficulties. Team 4, in contrast, dramatically reiterated to make their initial, highly sophisticated proposal more feasible for the contexts in which MSF works. However, the revised solution’s impact was too limited for MSF’s purposes. Team 4 did not reiterate the concept thereafter as the interest of the team diminished to continue working.

Team 2 held only one meeting. Around the same time, another company approached MSF and offered to adapt a similar existing product for MSF’s needs. MSF is pursuing this further; thus, MSF and team 2 decided not to continue their project.

Team 3, pushed mostly by one very motivated individual, elected to investigate their problem further by conducting a survey of MSF surgeons. That research found that improper use of different types of scissors might be damaging them. However, the team leader was reassigned within his company and was unable to continue managing this project. Lacking this leadership, the team disbanded; however, MSF continues to investigate these findings internally.

Select appropriately scoped challenges

Commentators note that if a challenge is too broad and/or complex, hackathon participants struggle to narrow the scope sufficiently to enable them to start work.2 However, a challenge that is too specific will limit room to explore creative solutions.2 So what is the proper balance? For organisations that are relatively new to facilitating hackathons—like MSF—leaning towards a relatively narrow scope and low complexity appears advisable. ‘A way to provide an appropriate surgical headlamp for surgeons in humanitarian surgical care’, which team 1 chose to address, exemplifies this. Here, the narrow scope and low complexity fostered a rapid reiteration process that gave momentum to the project and thus ensured the continued engagement of the team. In contrast, ‘a way to enable MSF surgeons to obtain new skills to perform better and more types of surgery in the field’ proved too broad and difficult a challenge to scope down ahead of a thorough problem analysis within the hackathon’s time limits.

Find alternative ways to explain problems in humanitarian contexts

Participants’ general unfamiliarity with humanitarian medical work was a significant challenge to problem analysis. MSF has since experimented with alternative ways to explain the problems at the core of the challenges selected for the hackathon. At another event hosted by Japan Biodesign and MSF in June 2019, the core challenge was pitched within a short story and play.5 Such methods help participants without direct experience of humanitarian work to better understand the contexts in which their proposed solutions must function.

Feasibility versus desirability

Technological infeasibility is a common pitfall for projects conceived during a hackathon.6 Team 4 originally developed a so-called moon-shot concept. However, even after various attempts to adapt and simplify the proposal, the team members were unable to continue such a project on a voluntary basis. Even team 1, whose concept was much simpler, still faced technological challenges during the iteration phases that ultimately discouraged them from refining their prototype further.

The experiences of teams 1 and 4 indicate that technological feasibility should be assessed early and ideas refined accordingly with particular attention paid to the impact of such refinement on the effectiveness of the proposal. More generally, organisations with extremely limited capacity for product development projects—like MSF—should only consider proposals requiring minimal levels of this sort of investment.

Measures to consider for encouraging project continuation

MSF and Japan Biodesign offered significant posthackathon support to winning teams. While the importance of this is often stressed to encourage project continuation,7 the dissolution of all our winning teams before the end of their respective design processes suggests that follow-up support alone is insufficient. Two specific observations bear highlighting.

First, while the moon-shot proposal initially provoked a noticeably higher level of motivation among the team to continue work, that excitement appears to have been much more vulnerable to the realities of humanitarian work. As those realities forced reiterations that scaled back the ambition of the project, the interest of the team to continue working concurrently diminished, and the quality of their reiterations dropped. This again highlights the benefits of steering teams early towards technologically less-demanding solutions, which are more realistic in typical medical humanitarian contexts.

Second, it is worth inquiring into the interests of volunteers’ respective employers in the project their staff produced during the hackathon. This gives opportunity to negotiate a time commitment for which they may release their staff and even explore additional ways those employers might offer help. Employers, especially large companies, may be motivated by a corporate social responsibility policy, development of their human capital or opportunities to raise their own public profile.8 On the other hand, small-sized and medium-sized medical device companies may be motivated by finding a new business portfolio by a hackathon. Without such commitments, our experience again highlights the difficulties volunteers face to give sufficient time.