Hackamon 2019

Prizes (worth over $25,000)

First prize: Value $16,000

• Mentorship and workspace at eSolutions for three months (total of 24 days) to develop your solution
• Innovation Training with Peter Bradd
• Year-long subscription to InVision for your team
• VR headsets (for each team member)

Second prize: Value $4,000

• Year-long subscription to InVision for your team
• Innovation Training with Peter Bradd
• VR headsets (for each team member)

Third prize: Value $2,000

• Year-long subscription to InVision
• VR headsets (for each team member)

Participants Choice Award: Value $3,000

• Innovation Training with Peter Bradd
• Sphero Specdrum

Judging criteria

Impressiveness of idea/solution/approach/technology:
WOW factor of the idea or solutions; it shows a different way of thinking, working, or applying technology to the problem.

Originality
Truly new ways of thinking about the problems, solutions, processors or technology.

Impact
Represents a positive impact on the way the Monash community lives, studies and/or works.

User experience
The user has been central to the development of the solution.

Mentors

Peter Bradd (Master of ceremonies)

Peter Bradd was recently recognised as one of the top 10 most influential people in Australian technology. As an entrepreneur, he's founded 6 companies over the past decade.

At the age of 22, he partnered with Qantas to create Qantas Postcards, a service which let customers turn their own photos into real postcards printed and posted within 24 hours. He was a founding director and initial CEO of Fishburners, Australia's first and most popular tech co-working space, which has supported over 1,000 Technology entrepreneurs. He's also a founding director and initial CEO of StartupAUS, Australia's national advocacy group for technology entrepreneurs and worked with Malcolm Turnbull on the National Science and Innovation Policy, a set of 20 initiatives which significantly enhanced the policy settings for Technology entrepreneurs in Australia.

He is currently the Federal Government's first 'thinker in residence' for the Digital transformation Agency, as well as running his own consultancy building innovation environments in large enterprise and being a busy father to his 2-year-old twin daughters.

Danielle Storey

Danielle is the CEO of the Eastern Innovation - a cool coworking and startup scaling space just 1km from Monash Uni.

Today she is going to share with you how good your pithing skills already are and how you can convert that to winning a hackathon.

She is passionate about the future of work, business and life and would, without hesitation, jump into and trial a driverless vehicle on Melbourne roads, buy and wear the latest wearable or play with the latest technology available that let's humans do what they are good at - engage with each other in a way that makes the world a happier place.

Carl Spurling

Carl is the founder of Proquo, Chief Executive Story and Value Hike. Prior to being an entrepreneur, he worked as a management consultant for Accenture, and then as a corporate executive at NAB where he helped to established NAB Labs, the bank's innovation division.

He is very experienced in all aspects of product and company creation with a particular interest in shaping a future vision for a business, drawing on multiple innovation practices from across industries.

Carl has an appreciation of excellence and an authentic working style. He believes in the power of innovation and the shock of the new.

Kurt Heiz

Kurt is a well rounded senior architect and leader with the capability of working directly with customers to define and implement solutions and deliver business outcomes which have commercial benefits.

Extensive experience in architecting multi-million dollar enterprise scale systems, project management, team leadership, mentoring, solution design, and implementing innovative technological solutions, with a strong cloud focus.

Excellent communication skills, an asset in developing and maintaining business relationships and interacting with a wide range of people at different levels and with diverse backgrounds.

Capable of delivering consistently high results, paying attention to detail whilst working under pressure. Strong decision making skills, adept at prioritising time and resources to facilitate 100% completion of projects within time and budget constraints, without compromising on quality of service or standards.

Using existing technologies to create innovative solutions to drive down bottom line costs and increase top line revenue.

Specialties include: Architecture aligned with Business Benefits, Innovation, Cloud Solutions, Mobile Solutions, Digital Solutions, Retail solutions, Call Centre solutions incorporating Chat Bots technology, B2B and Microservices, Team Management and Line Management

Juan Mejia

Juan Mejia is the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Technical Account Manager (TAM) for Monash University, and his job is to help the university achieve operational excellence in the AWS Cloud, to enable Monash to continue being Australia's largest and most innovative university.

For the past 10 years, Juan has worked with multi-million dollar enterprises as a technical consultant and advisor. For example, he has implemented network monitoring solutions nationwide that helped the state governments improve the quality and availability of their Radio networks, that provide critical communications for fire fighters, police and ambulance. He is now part of one of the most innovative companies in the planet, and his favourite aspect of his role is that he gets to work with cutting edge technology, day in and day out, to help his customers accelerate their own pace of innovation.

Juan is passionate about technology, innovation, teaching and sports, and hopes to provide support and guidance to the next generation of innovators.

Judges

Trevor Woods

Trevor has been the Chief Information Officer of Monash University, Australia's largest and most innovative university, since 2015 after having served in similar roles at the universities of Alberta and Lethbridge in Canada. He believes that the biggest digital disruption coming to Higher Education is in administration, and that Monash is well positioned to modernise. Though universities challenge accepted ways in the world, at Monash, we also challenge OUR accepted ways; that this is one of our strategic advantages. Trevor is leading the multi-year effort to modernise the student experience and administration and helping to drive a sustained culture of change by scaling Agile and cross-disciplinary design and delivery; running hackathons and popup innovations; supporting startups with a studio to 'test drive' creations; and involving resident entrepreneurs. Trevor has significantly reduced the time-to-benefit realization and provided organisation-wide cost savings while delivering enhanced levels of service, satisfaction, and improved business outcomes.

Judy Anderson

Judy's career has had a laser focus - to help people and organisations make innovation repeatable, scalable and profitable. Her business degree focussed on Entrepreneurship, during which she studied International Business at Ecole Supérieure de Commerce in France and represented RMIT at the Annual Collegiate Entrepreneurship Organisation Conference in Chicago, USA.

Having spent the last four and a half years at Australia's leading innovation consultancy, Inventium, Judy has built a reputation as a world-class thought leader and keynote speaker on all things innovation. Before joining Inventium, she managed the National Innovation Program for Deloitte Australia, helping people to tackle client challenges, generate creative solutions and ultimately capture the value being created in the market.

Judy is now the CEO of Startup Victoria, a not-for-profit, membership based organiser of the biggest startup events in Australia. Startup Vic's community numbers more than 15,000+ practising and aspiring startup founders. Judy's focus is on helping Victoria become a world class startup ecosystem. As an entrepreneur at heart, Judy is also working on 2 startups of her own. If you buy her a whisky - she'll tell you all about them!