Innovation strategy · Experimentation
How do you get better innovation outcomes without killing the creativity that makes a hackathon work?
American Airlines’ annual HackWars brought together roughly 1,000 employees across 100 teams to experiment, build, and turn ideas into working prototypes. The event generated plenty of creativity, but there was an opportunity to connect more of that energy to real problems the business was trying to solve.
A hackathon is designed to move fast, and that’s part of what makes it work. But speed also makes the starting point matter. A team could spend the event building an impressive prototype without knowing whether the problem was significant enough for the business to pursue, whether someone was already working on it, or what constraints and context they were missing.
The ingredients for better innovation were already there. They just weren’t connected. HackWars brought together people who could build. American had people who understood the problems. I saw an opportunity to put them in the same room.
What I changed
I created the Business Cantina to bring real business problems into HackWars without taking away the freedom that made the event work.
For the 2019 event, I partnered with the Emerging Technology team and worked across 12 business units to recruit leaders and subject-matter experts, help them identify challenges worth bringing to the event, and prepare them to engage with teams differently than they would in a traditional project environment. Instead of assigning problems or prescribing solutions, the Business Cantina gave participants a place to explore challenges, ask questions, understand the context behind them, and decide whether there was something they wanted to pursue.
01 · Find the problems
Bring real challenges into HackWars
Partnered with leaders and subject-matter experts across 12 business units to identify problems and opportunities employees could explore during the event.
02 · Provide the context
Make expertise accessible
Created a place where teams could talk directly with people who understood the problem, ask questions, uncover constraints, and learn what mattered before deciding what to build.
03 · Protect the freedom
Let teams choose where to play
Challenges were opportunities, not assignments. Teams decided what interested them, interpreted the problem themselves, and used their own creativity and technical expertise to explore possible solutions.
04 · Bring the business back in
Test more than whether it worked
Connected teams back to business leaders so emerging concepts could be evaluated not only as working prototypes, but as ideas with enough relevance and value for leaders to want to carry them forward.
The business brought the problem. The teams still owned the exploration.
What changed because of it
Connecting HackWars teams to real business problems changed the quality of what came out of the event.
Instead of waiting until final presentations to find out whether an idea resonated with the business, teams could ask questions, challenge assumptions, and refine their thinking throughout the event.
Viable, business-backed prototypes coming out of HackWars, compared with approximately two in previous years.
01 · More viable concepts
Creativity became more connected to actual need.
With direct access to business problems and expertise, more prototypes finished the event with both a working concept and interest from leaders who saw potential value.
02 · 12 business units engaged
The business became part of the innovation process.
Leaders and subject-matter experts weren’t just judging finished prototypes. They contributed problems, context, and feedback while teams were still exploring, creating a different relationship between the people experiencing the challenges and the people experimenting with solutions.
What this taught me
Creating better ideas is only one part of building an innovation capability. You also need somewhere for the good ones to go.
HackWars showed me what could happen when you connected people who understood the problems with people who had the freedom and technical ability to experiment. We didn’t need to prescribe solutions or add layers of process. Giving teams better access to business context was enough to dramatically increase the number of viable, business-backed prototypes.
But I was already asking the uncomfortable next question: What happens if this works?
I knew I would be leaving for maternity leave shortly after HackWars, and the Emerging Technology team I was partnering with was primarily developers. There wasn’t a formal innovation program, dedicated product ownership, or established pathway for deciding what happened to promising concepts and the employees who had built them. Some leaders took ideas back into their organizations, which was encouraging. But there wasn’t a consistent way for a HackWars team with a strong prototype to keep developing it, transition it to another team, or even remain involved as the idea moved forward.
That experience changed how I think about innovation. A great experiment can prove what’s possible. A real innovation capability creates the conditions to keep doing something with what you discover.
Running an innovation program?
Let’s make sure the good ideas have somewhere to go.
Creativity works better when it has a real problem to chew on.
Let’s talk →or email sbinger@stephaniebinger.com
Better questions lead to brighter ideas.