Hackathons tap Americans’ innovative spirit

Americans are developing technologies to solve pressing challenges through hackathons that tap young minds for innovative ideas while fostering collaboration.

Government, universities and the private sector are using these competitions — typically 36- to 48-hour brainstorming sessions — to develop technology tools for everything from diagnosing and treating disease to helping people survive in the wilderness. Held at schools or workplaces, hackathons convene students from an array of disciplines, including coding specialists, engineers, scientists and businesspeople. They work in teams to develop new technologies, often on little sleep.

The United States is home to 350 hackathons each year, more than any other country, according to the California-based tech firm HackerEarth. What’s more, 80% of America’s Fortune 100 companies hold hackathons to spur innovation.

High school students run an additional 450 hackathons nationwide to showcase their talents, says Hack Club, a nonprofit network of high school coding clubs.

From students to entrepreneurs

The first student-led hackathon, PennApps, started at the University of Pennsylvania in 2009 to give engineering students a new way to develop and showcase their skills. Since then, hackathons have sprung up at college campuses across the United States.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Hacking Medicine has helped launch companies that have raised $2.5 billion in funding. Innovations developed since the hackathon’s 2011 founding include a delivery service that ships presorted doses of pharmaceuticals and an artificial intelligence tool that helps dentists interpret X-rays, diagnose disease and propose treatments.

Radana Dvorak, a computer science professor at Saint Martin University near Seattle, said the school’s first hackathon, in March, motivated students to find ways to help others, an aim consistent with Saint Martin’s Catholic principles. “The students took a lot of lessons out of it and were so inspired by the social good” their innovations can bring, Dvorak says.

The winning app, StillGood, connects restaurants with excess food to charities that feed the hungry. Another innovation, SurvivalAI, provides guidance for emergency situations like being stranded in the wilderness, even when the user is offline.

Advancing innovation abroad

In January, the U.S. Department of State launched the Code for Impact: U.S.-Nepal Tech Innovation Hackathon, a series of seven hackathons across Nepal. Participants used global tech platforms and artificial intelligence tools to develop innovations for education, health, agriculture, commerce and tourism. Code for Impact’s extended, six-month format included virtual training sessions and mentorship to move teams of innovators toward commercialization and market adoption.

The tech-focused training, launched with private-sector partners in Nepal, comes as the United States is working with other nations to advance technological progress and mutual prosperity through AI standards and governance models that will foster trusted digital infrastructure and secure supply chains.

NASA’s Space Apps Challenge enables participants worldwide to use NASA data to develop solutions that support future space missions. Since 2012, the NASA challenge has drawn participants from 190 countries who develop innovations in astrophysics, software development and other fields. Awards for winners include a trip Florida to watch a launch at the Kennedy Space Center.

Allissa Dillman, of the National Institutes of Health-supported Common Fund Data Ecosystem Training Center, says hackathons forge relationships between government and citizens that can spur future innovation. Hackathons are “a very powerful tool to get the community engaged,” she says.