Siemens PLM Europe Hackathon

Earlier this fall, Siemens PLM ran yet another Hackathon, this time for the European offices. As in earlier events, this Hackathon took place over two days, providing 68 people on 17 teams a day and a half to code their innovative projects and prepare their demos, and then make their brief presentations during the afternoon of the second day. The judges then had their say.

This time the event took place simultaneously at six different offices in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Romania. Tali Segall, Head of Innovation at SPLM who organized the Hackathon, turned it into a virtually connected event that spanned all the sites at the same time.She arranged to have desktop sharing apps, conference calling and Skype for video at each location

 All the participants really got into the challenge, drawing out the best from themselves 

in the effort to succeed.

With all that endurance hacking, the participants also enjoyed the “carrot” of plentiful



refreshments

and meals delivered to the offices.

The main idea, as always, was to have some fun and collaborate…

 

and to build something amazing.

 

And the judges, as usual, wanted to see if the project ideas were original and innovative, and to rate their execution and implementation, as well as their business potential, and at the end of the day, to gauge how convincing the teams’ presentations and demos were.



And like the icing on the cake, Tali had a survey ready, which she asked all of the participants to take after the Hackathon was over. Graphically, the responses looked like this:



In their written comments, these reactions were typical:

 .

So the European Hackathon showed once again that both the company and the employees who participated got a lot of value out of the event. The Can Do attitude was evident in each of the country sites and there were certainly projects whose ideas carry good potential for follow-up. And if you’re wondering what could possibly come next… did you hear about the mega Hackathon we just held in Pune? 770 coders took part! But more on that another time…