High praise and great outcome for first Hack Hawke's Bay event

The winning Business Hawke's Bay team of the first Hack Hawke's Bay event. Photo / Business Hawke's Bay

After an intensive 48 hours the very first Hack Hawke's Bay (The HAKA-thon) event has sparked a sense of inspiration in the region, organisers say.

Co-organiser Barry Soutar says the weekend's event was the first-time the joint accelerated business activation programme from Datacom and T3W (National Māori Tech and Investment) had been run in the Bay with 80 participants.

"The energy in the room over the two days was amazing, and the solutions presented at the end, simply brilliant. It more than delivered on our hopes for the event."

Savannah Peterson, a visiting technology leader and connector from Silicon Valley, on her 13th visit to New Zealand says: "The hackathon was massively inspiring; but more importantly I am confident we'll see an impact as a result in the region.

"I suspect sometimes that Kiwis don't know how special they are, and the magic that happens when you celebrate and empower Māori business.

"What's good for Māori is good for the Bay and for New Zealand, and it's good for the world. I can't say it enough," says Peterson.

"I was particularly impressed to see the synergies between local government and creative minds in the region. Hawke's Bay is a fantastic place, and I hope that this weekend reminded participants of that.

The event successfully blended Māori aspirations and outcomes for job pathways and opportunities with the development of commercial product/service prototypes.

The winner on the day was a talent attraction and retention platform hosted by Business Hawke's Bay, second place went to Empowered, a game-based teaching platform for dyslexic students and third was Clearly, a consumer facing carbon footprint comparative app hosted by Napier City Council.

All the participating organisations and sponsors will now look at the next steps to bringing these solutions to execution for the benefit of the region.

Carolyn Neville, CEO of Business Hawke's Bay, says that the winning solution will be commercialised for the benefit of the region.

"The diverse experience and skillsets of our team members made for a winning combination.

"Bringing together people with different backgrounds meant that we got a broad range of ideas that we could work with," says Neville.

"Our challenge was to build a regional talent management system, and we rose to that challenge in the best possible way."

Kerry Topp, dssociate director of innovation at technology services firm, Datacom says: "Datacom has grown from a start in a garage in Christchurch to employing more than 6,500 people in New Zealand and around the world.

Local Māori start-up Orawa Ltd committed to wellbeing economics led the initiative bringing the co-organisers – Datacom and Te Tira Toi Whakangao (T3W) a group of global Māori tech companies and Māori sector investors working together to build a virtually connected Māori business support ecosystem, supported in the region by Business Hawke's Bay - to the region.