Collabatron, a staff idea and innovation incubator.

I had been at too many companies where some of the best ideas were left to quiet conversations by the coffee machine, water fountain, or maybe over drinks after work (without management there). There needed to be a way to give a platform to these ideas. How could we give an opportunity to share these ideas in a constructive way while also giving management the potential chance to action on them?

My idea was simple in its conception (a ton of work in execution), let’s take the basic construct of a hackathon, add more than just developers to it, and have Shark Tank style pitches to an executive board and a huge audience of their peers at the end of the 2 days.

Working with less than a $1500 budget, we had nearly 200 staff participate, along with the full support of the executive team. We ran the event 3 times starting in 2015, with nearly a dozen ideas moving from the initial pitch into reality over the course of that time.

Below is just an incredibly small selection of the materials we created to support the event.