INNOVATION STRATEGY | EXPERIMENTATION
How do you get better innovation outcomes without killing the creativity that makes a hackathon work?
American Airlines' annual HackWars brought together roughly 1,000 employees across 100 teams to experiment, build, and turn ideas into working prototypes. The event generated plenty of creativity, but there was an opportunity to connect more of that energy to real problems the business was trying to solve.
For the 2019 event, I partnered with the Emerging Technology team to introduce a new approach: bring leaders and subject-matter experts from 12 business units directly into the hackathon so teams could explore real business challenges, ask questions, test assumptions, and get feedback while their ideas were still taking shape.
The goal wasn't to tell teams what to build. It was to give their creativity better problems to work on.
The Innovation Challenge
A hackathon is designed to move fast. That is part of what makes it work. Teams form around ideas, experiment with technology, and have a limited amount of time to turn something interesting into a working prototype.
But speed also makes the starting point matter.
If a team began with an idea based primarily on what they thought might be useful, they could spend the event building an impressive prototype without knowing whether the problem was significant enough for the business to pursue, whether someone was already working on it, or what constraints and context they were missing.
Meanwhile, leaders and subject-matter experts across American were sitting on exactly that context. They understood operational pain points, customer and employee needs, business priorities, and problems they hadn't necessarily had the resources or technology to explore.
HackWars brought together people who could build. American had people who understood the problems. I saw an opportunity to put them in the same room.
The ingredients for better innovation were already there. They just weren't connected.
BUSINESS
Problems worth solving.
Leaders and subject-matter experts understood the customer, employee, and operational challenges their organizations were facing, along with the context and constraints behind them.
HACKWARS TEAMS
People ready to experiment
Employees brought technical skills, creativity, and the freedom to explore possibilities outside their normal day-to-day work.
THE MISSING PIECE
A way to bring them together
HackWars didn't have a structured way for teams looking for meaningful problems to connect with the business experts who understood them.
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I didn't need to redesign HackWars. I needed to create a bridge between the people who understood the problems and the people ready to build something around them.
What I Saw
What I Changed
I created the Business Cantina to bring real business problems directly into HackWars without taking away the freedom that made the event work.
I worked across 12 business units to recruit leaders and subject-matter experts, help them identify challenges worth bringing to the event, and prepare them to engage with teams differently than they would in a traditional project environment.
Instead of assigning problems or prescribing solutions, the Business Cantina gave HackWars participants a place to explore challenges, ask questions, understand the context behind them, and decide whether there was something they wanted to pursue.
The business brought the problem. The teams still owned the exploration.
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FIND THE PROBLEMS
Bring real challenges into HackWars
Partnered with leaders and subject-matter experts across 12 business units to identify problems and opportunities employees could explore during the event.
PROVIDE THE CONTEXT
Make expertise accessible
Created a place where teams could talk directly with people who understood the problem, ask questions, uncover constraints, and learn what mattered before deciding what to build.
PROTECT THE FREEDOM
Let teams choose where to play
Challenges were opportunities, not assignments. Teams could decide what interested them, interpret the problem themselves, and use their own creativity and technical expertise to explore possible solutions.
BRING THE BUSINESS BACK IN
Test more than whether it worked
Connected teams back to business leaders so emerging concepts could be evaluated not only as working prototypes, but as ideas with enough relevance and value for leaders to want to carry them forward.
The Business Cantina added just enough structure to connect innovation to real needs without turning HackWars into another corporate project process.
What Changed Because of It
Connecting HackWars teams to real business problems changed the quality of what came out of the event.
The Business Cantina gave teams access to business context while they were still exploring and building. Instead of waiting until final presentations to discover whether an idea resonated with the business, teams could ask questions, challenge assumptions, and refine their thinking throughout the event.
The result was a significant increase in prototypes that business leaders saw enough value in to support moving forward.
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VIABLE, BUSINESS-BACKED PROTOTYPES
Compared with approximately two emerging from HackWars in previous years.
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MORE VIABLE CONCEPTS
Creativity became more connected to actual need.
By giving teams direct access to business problems and expertise, more prototypes finished the event with both a working concept and interest from leaders who saw potential value in what had been created.
12 BUSINESS UNITS ENGAGED
The business became part of the innovation process.
Leaders and subject-matter experts weren't simply judging finished prototypes. They contributed problems, context, and feedback while teams were exploring them, creating a different relationship between the people experiencing the challenges and the people experimenting with solutions.
A BIGGER QUESTION EMERGED
Generating better ideas exposed what was still missing.
The experiment demonstrated that connecting business needs with HackWars talent could produce stronger concepts. It also surfaced the next challenge: American didn't have a formal pathway for promising prototypes or their teams after the event ended.
Some leaders took concepts back into their organizations to pursue, but there wasn't a consistent mechanism for HackWars teams to continue developing their work or transition it into another team.
HackWars proved we could improve the front end of innovation. It also showed me how much more was needed on the back end.
What This Taught Me
Creating better ideas is only one part of building an innovation capability. You also need somewhere for the good ones to go.
HackWars showed me what could happen when you connected people who understood the problems with people who had the freedom and technical ability to experiment. We didn't need to prescribe solutions or add layers of process. Giving teams better access to business context was enough to dramatically increase the number of viable, business-backed prototypes coming out of the event.
But I was already asking the uncomfortable next question: What happens if this works?
I knew I would be leaving for maternity leave shortly after HackWars, and the Emerging Technology team I was partnering with was primarily developers. There wasn't a formal innovation program, dedicated product ownership, or established pathway for deciding what happened to promising concepts and the employees who had built them after the event.
Some leaders took ideas back into their organizations and continued pursuing them, which was encouraging. But there wasn't a consistent way for a HackWars team with a strong prototype to keep developing it, transition it to another team, or even remain involved as the idea moved forward.
That experience changed how I think about innovation. A great experiment can prove what's possible. A real innovation capability creates the conditions to keep doing something with what you discover.