What I learned from a hackathon

Yesterday I particpated in hackathon to detect scoliosis, a curvature of the spine that develops during growth. My team did not win the competition but I had a lot fun participating and I gained some valuable technical skills, e.g. using Tensorflow to classify images. However I think there is another important lesson to be learned from this experience, one which applies to innovation and has managerial implications. Conventional wisdom tells us that:

1. Teams with the most resources win.
2. Teams with the most experience members win.
3. Solutions that are complex outperform simpler ones.

This is probably true in some cases, but definitely not an absolute truth. In fact, the smallest and youngest team, consisting of only 2 people won and rightfully so. Within 1 day they managed to create a mobile app to segment the image against a non-uniform background. Furthermore, the simpler solutions outperformed some of the more complex ones, i.o.w. they were better at detecting scoliosis. Thus it's not the amount of resources or experience that counts, it's about reusing existing knowledge and combining this in new ways to create novel ideas.