Do you run hackathons to drive innovation?

We started doing hackathons a couple years back and we also have an annual idea competition. We list all the ideas and it's a way of leading by example. We have to assure people that we only fire people if they're borderline incompetent or have malicious intent. If you're going full tilt every single day, I'm not going to fire you. I'm just going to make sure I channel you in the right direction.

I’ve participated in some hackathons at prior institutions. Some clever ideas come out of those events. The beauty of the hackathon is that it's okay to fail fast, which is something I try to encourage our staff to do. I want them to adopt agile methods and understand that no one's been fired for failing. People are afraid of making a mistake, so I’ll say, "Who's the last person you saw terminated because they made a mistake, or something didn't work?" The cool thing about hackathons is that a lot of things don't work until they do and they move them along quickly. At least that was the case for the solutions we found through hackathons at this prior institution.