Innovation

Today we're here at Microsoft's UK HQ for our Hackathon 2024, where eight teams are competing for a cash prize and an incubation budget to make their ideas come to life.

This is the biggest Hackathon at Aviva so far.

So our hackathon 24 is a three day event. We're spending two days here at Microsoft HQ with the finale over at LinkedIn.

The experience has been amazing so far. We are like in a great office. We are surrounded by great people. What we have been able to achieve being together in the same room in two days, we would have achieved it in probably a month.

It's been inspirational, kind of coming to the Microsoft Office and being great, sort of meeting new faces and that kind of networking.

We've been really actually getting to know each other really, really well. Making sure that everyone knows what they have to work on and then really getting our pitch design and conception.

What's exciting is making sure that we are innovating and constantly within Aviva. Instead of standing still.

I’m one of the back-end developers, and we try and implement it using Azure services. That doesn't mean it's easy. It's actually very hard. But you know, we're giving our best shot.

But it's fantastic to all be in a room together and to start to plan out how we would implement. But just to spend time with people who are really passionate, about what they do.

Day three we're here at LinkedIn, which is really exciting, and I'm going to be presenting, feeling a little bit nervous, but I think it’s more excited nervousness.

Today we have seen some absolutely brilliant ideas which can fundamentally change the consumer journey and improve the customer experience.

So I got the privilege to walk around the eight teams rooms yesterday at Microsoft and really get a feel for what they were building, and but there was definitely a buzz that you could feel as soon as you sort of entered the floor.

Today we’ve been doing all of our presentations, been getting to hear all of the cool stuff the other teams have been doing. Oh, it's been absolutely fabulous.

I think I'll be taking away that attitude of innovation and actually trying to get things done in a really short amount of time because as this Hackathon has shown, you can really get a lot of stuff done in just three days.

So the winner is the green team.

Winners!

I'm Inaya and I’m Luke and we're Team Green and we've just won the Hackathon 2024 award. We did an absolutely amazing job. We smashed it. And we've got it to prove it.