Smart India Hackathon Learnings

As the summer is officially behind me, I look at the last 3 months and my journey with the Smart India Hackathon- the world's largest ever hackathon conducted this year across 75 colleges, involving 15000+ students. It was a great experience meeting the vision behind the hackathon Mohit Gambhir Ph.D., LL.B. He explained to me how innovation is a key to design thinking and product mindset that we need for the digital working environments we are in. Starting young with the junior and senior hackathons helps our youth to prepare for the real world problem-statements they will face as professionals. So, while this vision unfolded for the fifth time this year (largest ever), I worked together with Pratap Sanap Ph.D. who was one of the volunteers operationalising this vision into reality along with a Innovation Cell of AICTE. Sarim Moin Arindam Mandal

We worked together to align on the themes, the colleges, and how our Ambassadors will get involved to support the students so that we reach the best outcomes. Shell even offered virtual sessions where we got the chance to interact with more than 2600+ students on topics of Data enabling Carbon & Energy Trading & Unstructured Data. It was refreshing to see how curious the students are about energy transition. They wanted to know more about how they can build their skills to help with Powering Progress. The Smart India Hackathon itself, gives them a good foundation.

It was Anu Krishnan 's vision to become a partner this year so that we can gain insights into the talent and capabilities that India has to offer. Frans Klaassen MBA / CHO stood behind me like a rock as we tried to navigate and plan the different areas, the themes our Ambassadors would be involved in and, the preparation needed at our end to show up with our best foot forward. Kayoor Gajarawala gave his enthusiastic support to push us forward.

Key learnings from this experience:

• Students could connect and were enthusiastic with the purpose of Powering Progress for energy transition.
• Youth could connect with the fact how digitalisation can acceleration our journey to new energy systems.
• Youth are eager to make a difference with the work that they are learning to become professionals and were glad they had chosen this field.
• Hackathons are a great way to engage with people, their capabilities and skills while co-creating new digital solutions for addressing problems in an organisation or a nation.

It is finally a wrap! We are glad for our participation. Our Ambassadors have grown and learnt being a part of such an effort. The students have made their way back home safely. The winners await their reward money and for their solutions to be implemented. Not only the winners, sometimes, organisations and ministries work with the students to explore if their MVP can actually work and see if their work can be recognised. So, the effort of the students is not in vain. It is an experiment that changes their lives. Thank you to Rakesh N for being a great project manager in this experiment. Here's to more experimenting!