The 1st edition of the HPS Open Innovation Hackathon with LaStartupFactory, which took place in February 2017 for the first time in Morocco, brought together HPS executives with talented young students and entrepreneurs from the LaStartupFactory community. Together, they collaborated for 36 hours non-stop to develop a dozen innovative mobile app prototypes to improve the shopping experience for consumers in Morocco and around the world.
This competition is part of a more global program: the "HPS Open Innovation Program with ScreenDY". The implementation of an Open Innovation program involving LaStartupFactory and HPS was a natural step, since both structures, despite their completely different size (HPS is a multinational company present in more than 80 countries, LaStartupFactory is a support structure expert in innovation and digital), had the same objective: to stimulate and promote innovation to bring new, relevant and deployable concepts on the market! The HPS Open Innovation program with LaStartupFactory was therefore designed specifically to implement this common vision.
Step 1: Half-day of inspiration and discussions around innovation.
This stage, which took place a few days before the hackathon, involved different actors of the Moroccan innovation ecosystem. The two objectives of this half-day event were on the one hand to present the new HPS innovation approach (to accelerate and spread the process of integrating innovation to all employees) and on the other hand, to inspire the company's executives to participate in the first HPS Open Innovation hackathon that was about to take place.
Step 2: The hackathon: "a fluid, transparent payment that is even more focused on the shopping experience
The theme of the hackathon, "seamless, transparent and even more shopping experience-centric payment" was presented to the HPS executives in the first stage and sent to the young students and entrepreneurs via LaStartupFactory a week before the event so that the future participants would have time to think about ideas for innovative solutions.
PowerCARD integrated into the ScreenDY platform: a world first!
In order to allow all participants to quickly develop concrete solutions that could be more easily deployed on the market, HPS agreed with ScreenDY to integrate its famous "PowerCARD" payment system directly into the ScreenDY platform interface. Once the multi-skilled teams were formed (in general, each team included a developer, a designer, a marketer and an HPS executive), the competition could begin. The competition would last 36 hours and not a minute longer. Thanks to a great collaborative work involving internal and external mentors, the ScreenDY partners students (groups of volunteer students trained by ScreenDY), the ScreenDY teams, the teams were able to benefit from a very professional and high quality support and coaching! The motivation and passion of the young people present was contagious, and the HPS executive participants were also carried away by the stimulating and relaxed atmosphere of the hackathon..
Step 3: convince the jury in 4 minutes!
The final pitches of the 12 teams in competition were very tight. Many of them had done an excellent job of preparation and rehearsal to be able to perform well in front of the jury. The task was so difficult for the jury that the CEO of HPS and Mr. Alaoui decided to add 3 other prizes. Finally, 2 first prizes of 20 000 dh, 2 second prizes of 10 000 dh and 3 third prizes of 5000 dh were awarded to 6 teams. Another small gesture from HPS: a symbolic amount of 1000 dh was offered to all participants of the hackathon to thank them for their commitment and their sincere work.
Step 4: "Next Steps" support from LaStartupFactory and HPS
All the winning projects of this hackathon benefited from the fourth step of the HPS Open Innovation program: the "Next Steps". The goal of this last step was to accompany the teams so that they could take their innovative solutions from the prototype stage to the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) stage. Teams had at least one month to develop a product ready to be marketed. HPS and LaStartupFactory were firmly committed to helping them successfully deploy their solutions.