The format
An innovation sprint is not a hackathon. It's bigger.
A hackathon builds code. An innovation sprint solves a real problem end to end, from spark to a shippable prototype, with a corporate's actual challenge at the centre.
What an innovation sprint actually is
Strip it back and a sprint runs like a hackathon: over 36 hours, curated teams of three to four compete to turn a brief into working software, judged at the end. The difference is the brief. It is your real problem, not a generic theme, and that changes the whole weekend.
The talent is curated, and it is not only coders. Because we call it an innovation sprint, not a hackathon, it draws people from every domain who fit your case: developers, designers, and business minds, plus the domain experts who actually understand the problem. With today's tools almost anyone can build software. The real edge is having different angles attack the same problem at once.
Everyone applies, and multiple teams take on your case in parallel. So you don't get one answer. You get a portfolio of working solutions, each coming at your problem from a different angle.
The essentials
Real challenges
Partners bring genuine problems they cannot solve internally. Teams pick one and go deep.
Curated talent
Curated builders and domain experts from across Switzerland, selected and team-matched, not just coders.
Build, not pitch
Teams ship working solutions you can demo, not slides describing what they would do.
You pick the winner
A jury reviews what each team actually built. You pick your winner for your case, and you decide what to take forward.
What we mean by a case
Your case is your real challenge: an internal innovation topic, a validation question, or a technical use case. The problem comes from you. We sharpen the framing together before the event. Then multiple teams work it independently, in parallel, and you walk away with divergent solutions to the same question. Not one answer. A portfolio.
A real example
A Swiss HVAC manufacturer brought a dataset from the actuators they produce, plus a small hardware demo you could plug into over ethernet. The data was sitting unused. The challenge: turn it into a paid product for their customers. Multiple teams shipped different angles in 36 hours.
Your weekend, hour by hour
Day 1
Friday
Opening ceremony. The case partner pitches on the main stage, then sits down with the teams that picked their case for a deep-dive Q&A. Hacking begins at 20:00.
Day 2
Saturday
Continuous build. Many teams work through the night. Partners and mentors float between teams, give feedback, and push them to sharpen what they have.
Day 3
Sunday
Final submission in the morning, then team presentations in front of the jury. You decide the solution worth awarding, and the award ceremony closes the weekend.
Why 36 hours works
Thirty-six hours is the magic number. Long enough to build something real, short enough to force total focus. What teams ship in that window exceeds what everyone in the room imagined, every single time. We have never had a partner who saw it coming, and never met a builder who said they expected it. It is logistically hard, people sleep little and eat a lot, but it fits inside a weekend and it leaves room for genuinely crazy products. And you cannot fake it: under real pressure you see how people actually think, build, and hold up.
Sprints, not hackathons
We say innovation sprints on purpose, and it is the most important thing about us. A hackathon sounds like a coding competition for students. A sprint is open: the focus is the innovation, not the code. It is not a case competition and not a coding competition, it is all of it at once, which is why it draws motivated people from every domain who fit the case and add real value. More domains in the room means more views on the problem, and better solutions because of it.
What happens after the 36 hours
The weekend ends. The value does not. Here is what you walk away with, and how it keeps going.
- 01
You own what's built
Right away
The working solutions are yours. You leave with code, demos, and a winner you picked, ready to take forward however you want.
- 02
The talent stays reachable
After
The strongest builders and teams do not disappear on Sunday. Through our community you can re-engage the people who built the thing you liked.
- 03
Come back to iterate
Next time
A sprint is a starting point. Bring the sharpened problem to the next one and push it further, with everything you learned baked in.