New India Vibrant Hackathon 2023

Problem solving is at the heart of innovation and entrepreneurship activities. Young students across universities & innovators are the new source of creative pursuit in any innovation ecosystem. Quite often, the vast pool of energy of young students does not get optimally used due to lack of structured process and orientation. Many often, the innovation process does not provide suitable exposure to the students and other similar support in a systematic manner so that they can work on real life challenges. Many open innovation processes have been tried globally by now to involve potential innovators in problem solving and opportunity creation. Structured innovation processes and institutional mechanism in time bound manner is generally practised across academia and industry for the same purpose.

Sometime, time bound attempts of problem solving with right kind of mentorship and guidance also proves to be very effective. One of such intervention is widely practised hackathon model. Though primarily, it is intended to engage creative minds to solve and create proof of concept in a time bound nonstop process, it can also be tweaked to a blended mode of execution. In such process like hackathon, generally digital solutions for certain challenges are asked to be developed. But it can also be designed for developing hardware solutions by redesigning the process with suitable infrastructure, time frame and allied resources. In academia and industry, such hackathons have been one of the key processes to trigger new thoughts and attempt to solve given challenges in constraint of time and team efforts. In academic practise also, such pedagogy is quite prominent for imbibing problem-solving ability amongst young students.

Young students actively participated and demonstrated their innovative skills in such programs. Such programs need to be attempted in different context time to time so that it becomes an effective process innovation itself to harness creative minds. Such attempts also bring in academia, industry and governance together which creates an opportunity of co creation in a structured institutionalised manner.

The Education Department Government of Gujarat has taken series of initiatives to design and develop innovation processes and ecosystem across its affiliated colleges and universities. To structure and institutionalise various initiatives and support systems towards it, Student Start-up and Innovation Policy (SSIP 2.0) is designed and is being implemented. Under its mandate, various innovative interventions have been suggested to all universities. New efforts at various levels like institutional, pedagogical, process and community level have been suggested to engage and leverage students across the innovation value chain. As mentioned above, one of the key recommendations to all universities and academia led innovation system is to organise efforts like hackathon and similar time bound problem solving and innovation activities.

While taking the legacy further, the Gujarat Knowledge Society, Education Department is organizing “New India Vibrant Hackathon 2023” under SSIP 2.0. Though primarily the program will be designed and executed for finding solutions for various challenges of the State government departments and municipal corporations, further attempts will be made to develop the mechanism and process to innovate hardware/software solutions and innovation pertaining to different challenges. The overall objective of this program is to channelize huge among of youth energy which is currently being underutilised towards engaging them with more constructive agendas and imbibe new skill and attitude to make them problem solver and progressive contributor in civil society at large.