The Innovation Formula

CHAPTER 13 PARTICIPATION The workplace isn't Hollywood — why we don't need stars

If you have done any reading about innovation, you have probably heard of hack days, or hackathons. The concept has gained popularity in the last few years, and is now a staple event at many tech companies. The hack day concept actually started at Yahoo back in 2005, when Chad Dickerson (now CEO of Etsy) was working in the Search division.

‘One of the things I noticed when I was at Yahoo was a website inside Yahoo called the Idea Factory', explains Dickerson. ‘The idea behind the Idea Factory was to have a suggestion box for ideas. If you worked at Yahoo and you thought you had the solution to world peace, you could go to the Idea Factory and say, “If the world just worked this way then this would happen”.'

Dickerson noticed that the Idea Factory was never short of ideas. Indeed, everyone in the company had lots of ideas but unfortunately, ideas don't really mean anything unless they are implemented. When Dickerson started Hack Day at Yahoo, it was with the idea that a team of people could take an idea and, within a compressed period of time, actually build it into something tangible.

A critical factor of Dickerson's hack days was that people were given free rein. ‘Inside a corporation that's difficult, because a corporation has its objectives and you're actually paying people, but I had really great support from the management at Yahoo', says Dickerson. ‘I came up with the concept through hearing ...