A Race To The Finish: The Movember Foundation’s First Hackathon With IE

The Movember Foundation is taking part in its first Hackathon next weekend to prototype exciting new ideas and drive future growth.

The Foundation’s long term technology partner, IE, is running the event in their Melbourne warehouse, with over 40 talented tech experts hacking for 24 hours and aiming to tackle two of the Foundation’s key business challenges through intense ideation and creativity.

The Hackathon forms part of the Foundation’s current strategy to reposition itself as an organisation that has a year round presence, rather than only being known for global moustache growth, across 21 countries, in November each year.

The IE Hackathon for The Movember Foundation will be kicked off by The Hon Phillip Dalidakis MP, Minister for Small Business, Innovation and Trade as well as a special welcome video all the way from the USA by Co-Founder of the Foundation Adam Garone.

A multi-skilled team of developers, designers, producers and UXers will work on prototyping solutions, before pitching their ideas to a panel of industry, including Paul Villanti and Byron Hill from The Movember Foundation, Jac Phillips from Bank of Melbourne, Dean Flynn from San Francisco startup FoyerLive and Rhys Hayes from IE.

The winning teams will be vying for one of two donated major prizes: a return trip next year to South by SouthWest, a revolutionary business innovation conference based out of Texas, USA, from The Movember Foundation and a $2,000 cash prize for the most innovative transactional idea from PayPal Braintree.

Movember Foundation head of technology Byron Hill said, “Technology is constantly changing the way we connect with one another. We’re looking to be positively disruptive in the digital space and be a part of this change by engaging a tech-savvy community of enthusiasts to donate their time and smart thinking to our cause.”

A Hackathon is an intensive ideation, concepting and prototyping exercise designed to be the stepping stone into business transformation and forward-thinking change. By having fresh eyes cast over the challenges facing The Movember Foundation, teams will truly be able to create innovative and practical outcomes in the 24 hours.

In this case, the solutions offered up during the pitch will be assessed on how well they respond to: the problem, ingenuity, commercial viability, quality of execution and presentation.

“We don’t want the solutions to sit around and gather dust and have committed to start work on developing the winning ideas immediately. The Hackathon takes place on a Saturday and we will literally start roll out on the Monday,” Hill continued.

“We’re incredibly grateful to the team at IE for donating their time, creative juices and IP to our cause. The Movember Foundation is going through an exciting period of change and innovation, as always, will play an important part in our future planning. We’re looking forward to seeing what the IE Hackathon for Movember throws up.”

IE co-founder, Rhys Hayes added, “We’re a group of thinkers who have a passion for problem solving and creativity through innovation, so we are looking forward to getting stuck into the biggest challenges facing Movember at our Hackathon.

“It will be an intense 24 hours but after nine years of partnership with the Foundation, we are proud to be donating our time to what really is a great cause close to our hearts.”

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