Entrepreneurs For Sustainability Hackathon Round Up
After a busy weekend volunteering at the BC Sustainable Energy Association’s Entrepreneurs for Sustainability Hackathon October 12 & 13 2019, I wanted mark the end the festivities by offering my summary of the event. First off, a big thank you to our hosts, 7 Gate Ventures, who provided the venue. Their offices make up the majority of the background in the images, and for duration of the event they made us feel entirely at home. Generally, however, one might not be surprised to find that I recall the venue very quiet at times as teams were intensely focused on their projects. Predictably, this reversed at meal times when people collected in the kitchen. The pitches at the end of day two were simply inspiring.
I was thrilled to see such strong proposals generated in such a short period of time. It impressed upon me again the value of these sorts of events to test and validate multiple proposed solutions effectively in a short time span. Sure one might be able to struggle along by oneself and get the same results eventually. But there is a unique advantage to collecting a multidisciplinary team together and looking deeply at one proposal. Hackathons have developed into an excellent vehicle for multidisciplinary and collaborative problem solving.
Pitches ranged from energy literacy apps to novel food waste diversion proposals. UBC’s Sustaingineering club, who ended up winning, put forward a strong idea for an electric vehicle charging app that connects home owners with spare charging capacity to EV owners as smoothly as Airbnb hosts and travellers. Another group recognized the ascent of electric vehicles in BC as a desirable market to attack by proposing a portable charging solution which reuses local car batteries. Lastly, the pitch closest to my heart (though it didn’t win) was a proposal consisting of a play toward a data-driven building retrofitting.
All the teams tried really hard, and I think Canada should be very proud of the leadership displayed by these potential entrepreneurs. To me, I see it as a sign that Canada should be able to meet our own international responsibilities, before exporting this technology to the world.
