Employees, customers, and NGOs hack and collaborate to build solutions for the world
Gurgaon, July 24, 2019: Microsoft India is hosting the sixth edition of its annual One Week Hackathon 2019, the largest private hacking event in the world. For the first time in India, the Hackathon will host customers and NGOs at Microsoft campus to hack and work on real-world challenges along with Microsoft employees.
In 2014, Microsoft started One Week, a series of events that bring employees together across the globe and across disciplines to inspire more organic connection and collaboration. The core event at One Week is the Hackathon, which invites all employees to hack to solve a problem, build a passion project, or simply develop a new skill.
Reena Dayal, Director Garage India, Microsoft said, “Hackathon enables employees to collaborate to solve a problem they care about, with a focus on the big picture. Employees take on challenges they feel passionate about or to come up with “the next big thing” for our customers and create experiences that are accessible to all.”
Reena further commented, “each year, we see more customer obsession, diversity and inclusion, and a drive to work together across Microsoft and with partners to make a difference. We are very excited about the latest edition of the One Week Hackathon 2019, for the first time in India, we have invited customers and NGOs to our campus to hack with Microsoft employees to solve challenges through technology.”
Hackathon reflects Microsoft’s unique culture and vision to empower every employee and organization on the planet to do more. At Microsoft, hacking is for all employees, technical and non-technical, who come together to find diverse and inclusive solutions. It’s now the largest private Hackathon in the world with 23500+ employees participating in 2018, 30% of who were non-engineers.
Hackathon focuses on empowering employees, teams, and the organization through upskilling, collaboration on a broader perspective, and building on new ideas of applying tech in interesting ways. Earlier hackathons have had great results, including products such as the Seeing AI app, Xbox adaptive controller, Kaizala and SMS Organiser.
The One Week hackathon is a flagship platform of The Garage, which fosters employee-led innovation, bringing together people across roles, skills, and experiences to lend their passion to create change in the world – to improve society, business processes, or for the sheer joy of hacking an existing project and making it better. It also offers the opportunity to learn new technologies and work closely with people from different backgrounds helping employees to integrate the cultural pillars of growth mindset, making a difference, diverse and inclusive, One Microsoft, and customer obsession into everyday work.
About Microsoft India
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @Microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Microsoft set up its India operations in 1990. Today, Microsoft entities in India have over 9,000 employees, engaged in sales and marketing, research and development and customer services and support, across 11 Indian cities – Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai, New Delhi, Gurugram, Noida, Hyderabad, Kochi, Kolkata, Mumbai and Pune. Microsoft offers its global cloud services from local data centers to accelerate digital transformation across Indian start-ups, businesses, and government agencies. In 2016, Microsoft opened one of its eight Cyber Security Engagement Centers in the country, to address security needs of both public and private sectors.
