Flipkart hackathon spews 100 ideas

Flipkart is looking at hackathons as a way to fasttrack innovation and build solutions that can be implemented in its business quickly. So far, it says a little over a dozen such solutions have made it to production, born at hackathons over the past six years.

The company’s seventh such 24-hour annual hackathon will come to a close on Friday, with over a 100 solutions emerging from it. Flipkart says, unlike other schemes to help engineers come up with innovations, hackathons work best because they have fewer restrictions on what engineers can build. “It’s an engagement programme to empower our engineers to create something that excites them. Engineers have a green signal to take projects to production, get experimental data and then take a call on viability. The teams just come together organically with their ideas,” said Amar Nagaram, engineering vice-president at Flipkart. The themes range from increasing customer impact, easing customer experience and simplifying employee interface to social welfare. Flipkart is also running another hackathon in Bengaluru to help solve traffic woes. The contest is open to people outside the organisation as well.