Driving Cultural Transformation - Microsoft Hosts World’s Largest Private Hackathon

Microsoft India is hosting the sixth edition of its annual One Week Hackathon 2019, the largest private hacking event in the world. For the first time in India, the Hackathon will host customers and NGOs at Microsoft campus to hack and work on real-world challenges along with Microsoft employees.

In 2014, Microsoft started One Week, a series of events that bring employees together across the globe and across disciplines to inspire more organic connection and collaboration. The core event at One Week is the Hackathon, which invites all employees to hack to solve a problem, build a passion project, or simply develop a new skill.

Reena Dayal, Director Garage India, Microsoft said, “Hackathon enables employees to collaborate to solve a problem they care about, with a focus on the big picture. Employees take on challenges they feel passionate about or to come up with “the next big thing” for our customers and create experiences that are accessible to all.”

Reena further commented, “each year, we see more customer obsession, diversity and inclusion, and a drive to work together across Microsoft and with partners to make a difference. We are very excited about the latest edition of the One Week Hackathon 2019, for the first time in India, we have invited customers and NGOs to our campus to hack with Microsoft employees to solve challenges through technology.”

Hackathon reflects Microsoft’s unique culture and vision to empower every employee and organization on the planet to do more. At Microsoft, hacking is for all employees, technical and non-technical, who come together to find diverse and inclusive solutions. It’s now the largest private Hackathon in the world with 23500+ employees participating in 2018, 30% of who were non-engineers.

Hackathon focuses on empowering employees, teams, and the organization through upskilling, collaboration on a broader perspective, and building on new ideas of applying tech in interesting ways. Earlier hackathons have had great results, including products such as the Seeing AI app, Xbox adaptive controller, Kaizala and SMS Organiser.

The One Week hackathon is a flagship platform of The Garage, which fosters employee-led innovation, bringing together people across roles, skills, and experiences to lend their passion to create change in the world - to improve society, business processes, or for the sheer joy of hacking an existing project and making it better. It also offers the opportunity to learn new technologies and work closely with people from different backgrounds helping employees to integrate the cultural pillars of growth mindset, making a difference, diverse and inclusive, One Microsoft, and customer obsession into everyday work.

What customers and NGOs have to say-

“Marrying Microsoft’s mission to empower everyone to achieve more with Deshpande foundation’s grass root knowledge of the problems that Indian farmers face is the epitome of using technology for real-time Innovation” - Mohd. Innus Khan, Director of Agriculture, Deshpande Foundation.

“The hackathon was a great experience and opportunity to ideate and accelerate solutions for mass entrepreneurs in a very short period. Market discovery through tech enablement is much needed and we had a good outcome which has the potential to solve for market linkages and be a game changer. Looking forward to more such targeted events in partnership with Microsoft.” - Vidya Chandy, Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship.

"Eleven01 is happy to have been part of the Microsoft global Hackathon, which allowed us to work with Microsoft internal team. It helped us immensely to accelerate our idea and showcase a solution around Azure" Rama Iyer, President & CTO Eleven01.