Over 600 DCU students to participate in Social Innovation Hackathon #Hack4Change

Dublin City University’s Business School is to run a large, virtual social innovation for over 600 undergraduate students working in 101 teams, from March 12th - 19th.

Coordinated by Dr Róisin Lyons, the hackathon is organised with the cooperation, support and sponsorship of industry partners and the social enterprise community in Dublin. Sponsors include Dublin City Council, the Climate Action Regional Office, CTYI and Irish Life and Health, while speakers and mentors are drawn from organisations as diverse as Focus Ireland and GOAL, tech start-up Robotify, right up to large organisations such as Mastercard and ESB. Students will interact with over 80 industry guests who have kindly volunteered their time to speak, mentor teams or act as judges for the pitch competition. 

The themes of this year’s hackathon are:

• Climate - including sustainability, fast fashion, smarter travel and more.
• Equality - diversity & inclusivity, wealth & housing inequity, global challenges, discrimination.
• Mental Health and Wellbeing – including post-covid living, cyberbullying and more.

Students voted from a list of over 300 HackTopics to select the challenge they would like to work on.

During the week, students will attend live talks from expert speakers, receive mentoring, and engage in both fun and formal activities. Teams will develop viable social enterprise ideas based on the themes above, and pitch their concepts to judges at the end of the week. All of this will be done through the virtual Gather Town platform and using Zoom. Currently, there are over 20 speaking events planned for the week, which are open to all DCU staff and students. 

Most #Hack4Change participants are first year students and the opportunity is a part of the innovative Learning Innovation for Enterprise (LIFE) programme developed by DCU Business School in 2019. The LIFE programme aims to provide all first year students with a solid foundation in all aspects of business, from start-ups to social enterprise, right up to large global organisations. Opportunities such as this Hackathon are developed to develop students teamwork skills, applied to social entrepreneurship, while also learning directly from organisations leading change in critical societal issues such as climate change. 

The LIFE programme has won two global awards for its innovative approach to teaching and learning, from global business education accreditation body AACSB and from ECIU, the European Consortium of Innovative Universities. 

To learn more about the Hackathon go to the event information site . With several prizes on offer for the innovative solutions proposed through this Hackathon an awards ceremony for the hackathon will be at 3pm on Friday 19th and is open to all.