By Tobias Bolli, Junior Project Manager Academic Relations
Squeezing the most out of only one or two days – hackathons are all about coming up with solutions in a short amount of time. Participants often forego lunch and dinner for a pizza break and a comfy hotel bed for a sleeping bag. Despite them containing the word “marathon”, hackathons are more like a prolonged sprint with participants typing away at their keyboards often throughout the night (the other part of the word doesn’t refer to “hacking” as in trying to breach other computer systems, but rather to a way of exploratory programming).
In our webinar on June 23 we explored the use of hackathons as an innovative education tool to tackle the world’s most pressing problems. The focus was on hackathons organized by the University of Geneva and Tsinghua University, both contributing solutions to the 17 sustainability development goals (SDGS) as outlined by the United Nations. Felix Fellmann, Head of International Cooperation at the Embassy of Switzerland in China, expressed his enthusiasm for the hackathon events and explained why the embassy supports it.
The world, perhaps now more than ever, is faced by a plethora of challenges ranging from the current pandemic to climate change, poverty, food security, and other worldwide challenges. That’s why, in Felix´s words, young brains are needed more than ever: highly engaged people who think outside the box and take risks to secure the future of the planet. He pointed out that Asia, boasting 60% of the world’s GDP and 60% of the young population, will play an important role in finding sustainable solutions, and that China in particular has an immense capacity of coming up with and also implementing good ideas.
A slide from Pearl illustrating the extent to which x-lab helps students developing and nurturing ideas.
Pearl Donghui Mao, Director of Tsinghua x-lab, School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University, continued by presenting the Tsinghua SDG Open Hack, which was inspired by a hackathon at the University of Geneva. When she started out, Pearl noticed that university resources for innovation were scattered. To concentrate them she initiated Tsinghua x-lab, a cross-discipline innovation platform with the aim of complementing traditional university courses as well as starting and nurturing promising projects. Thus far, x-lab has been a remarkable success, managing to nurture more than 1500 teams, with 200 receiving investments from the industry - an impressive 1.1 billion dollars in total.
Pearl underscored the strong partnership with the University of Geneva which was established in 2017. Xi Jinping himself was present at the signing of the memorandum highlighting the importance of the partnership. Being inspired by the Open Geneva project, Tsinghua University decided to launch a similar hackathon event under the banner of Tsinghua x-lab, the SDG Open Hack which was first held in September 2019. Its aim is to generate ideas which can be developed further all the way to actual value creation in the marketplace. Pearl stressed that science and engineering students, in order to successfully make the jump from idea creation to receiving funding from the industry, also have to be equipped with a business mindset. Success, it turns out, isn’t just about having and implementing ideas, it´s also about advertising and commercializing them.
As with most hackathons, the SDG Open Hack incentivizes coming up with solutions in a short amount of time, a mere 48 hours in this case. Besides wrestling with challenges, the hackathon is designed to foster collaboration, building social ties with a host of diverse team members, and presenting a project in front of a jury. It is also and mainly about a practical “hands-on” approach, a proactive and empowering way of learning. The event has seen participation of 13 different faculties and around 500 individual participants. There are plans to expand SDG Open Hack to other Asian universities and to students around the world.
The panelists from top left to bottom right: Felix Fellmann, Jonas Haertle, Thomas Maillart and Pearl Mao, as well as our moderator Libing Gu.
Thomas Maillart, President of Open Geneva and Senior Lecturer at the University of Geneva, subsequently talked about hackathons at his university. An important goal is to break information silos and bring together organizations which, under normal circumstances, wouldn’t consider collaborating. Diverse teams, such is the credo of Open Geneva, are best at coming up with fresh ideas. Due to the still omnipresent COVID-19 threat a planned festival with more than 50 hackathons and related events had to be cancelled, which naturally came as a big disappointment to Thomas. However the unfortunate imponderability came with a new and exciting opportunity. Shortly afterwards, Thomas was approached by the Canton of Geneva which enquired about ways to tackle the current COVID-19 induced crisis.
As a consequence of that inquiry, the Crisis & Resilience Innovation Found was created which is dedicated to finding practical solutions for the most pressing issues of today (such as the current low in business tourism). It is supposed to be the opposite of typical university education, which often revolves around sitting in a lecture hall and passively absorbing information. Instead the project encourages proactive and collective action towards creating a “new normal”. As Thomas explained, simply going back to the old ways of doing things wouldn’t be a solution. Rather the crisis should be viewed as a chance to bring about a fresh and more sustainable future. In order to find out which challenges are most prominent in people’s minds, various companies have been polled and 12 projects were selected on the basis of their feedback.
A slide by Thomas listing the numerous sustainability-related themes his project is centered around.
Jonas Haertle, Special Assistant to the Executive Director, United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), then explained why UNITAR pledged to continue partnering with Geneva and Tsinghua University to bring SDG Hack to other universities and countries. Tasked with providing training to help achieve the 17 sustainable development goals outlined by the UN, the organization is happy to provide support since the hackathons explicitly center around those development goals. Jonas stressed that a myriad of people need to be working together for there to be a chance of solving the biggest challenges the world is facing.
Questions and answers
During the Q&A period the Head of Entrepreneurship Center at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology asked both hackathon organizers how to balance quality and quantity of such events. Thomas from the University of Geneva stressed how important it is to make the challenges self-contained and broad enough to allow for different solutions. He also said that the outcome isn’t as important as the participant´s engagement during the event. Thus it is more about the journey of innovation, about cultivating a can-do attitude and feeling empowered as a consequence of it. Pearl from Tsinghua University echoed some of these thoughts and added that it is imperative to properly prepare professors taking part in the event. She added that Tsinghua University conducts satisfaction surveys among the students to continually improve the events.
A representative of Hong Kong Baptist University asked how to better implement SDG education to credit-based courses at the university. Jonas from UNITAR suggested to link these courses directly to the 17 sustainable development goals and mentioned that the goals were developed bottom-up with many universities directly involved in the process. Felix form the Embassy of Switzerland in China concluded the webinar by summarizing what entices him most about the hackathon projects. He emphasized the advantage of time pressure which forces participants to get down to the nitty-gritty and avoid the paralysis of perfectionism; a perfect solution, after all, doesn’t exist. Felix also lauded the unconventional character of the hackathons which are far removed from traditional classroom-scenarios and foster proactive and peer-inspired collaborations rather than the passive absorption of teaching materials.
Last but not least, we want to thank our four panelists Felix Fellmann, Pearl Donghui Mao, Thomas Maillart and Jonas Haertle for their inspiring talks and their thoughtful answers during the Q&A session.
Please find a link to the slides and webinar recording below:
