Day by Day

The weekend kicked off well last night when we were welcomed to the School of Population Health at the University of Auckland by the acting head of school, Prof Peter Adams. Deb Boyd, HiNZ Board member, welcomed everyone as well. Then it was time to pitch ideas, and seven people gave us the ideas they had been thinking about. David Downs, author of the popular book on innovation, ‘No. 8 Re-wired’ told us some stories about how New Zealanders succeed at innovation. he then explained how we can take things one step further (i.e. ‘re-wired’) by doing good R&D, commercialising our innovations, and collaborating with others. And that’s just what a hackathon is all about!

Today five groups have been hard at work on their ideas. The ideas include (1) a self-tracking tool for early intervention for relapses in people who have diverticular disease, (2) keeping patients in the loop with their lab results, (3) a learning tool for mothers who are about to or have just had their baby to enable good health decisions, (4) visual repository of medications, (5) identity authentication tool for health professionals, and (6) a support tool for people with rare health conditions.

They formed and stormed as groups last night and then this morning settled into the hard task of working out what their minimum viable product, its value proposition, and how their product can be commercialised. There was some heated debate about how to commercialise some of the products, especially in the face of how difficult it is to do that! Initial descriptions from last night of what the proposed ideas were changed during the course of today. The energy flowed and ebbed and flowed again, and when the pizzas arrived for dinner, the energy rose again.

Tomorrow will bring us down to the wire, when the groups have to work out how to demonstrate their minimum viable product!