Innovation Design Contest with Virtual Hackathon

Network Rail has run Hackathons in the past and struggled to contract for the solutions. This year we are thinking of the end to end process to allow us to complete the event quickly and seamlessly. We are seeking an innovation partner to help us to run a virtual hackathon within an innovation design contest to continue in supporting the business to rapidly solve key challenges whilst ensuring that solutions are implementable, successful and reach as many stakeholders as possible.

We are looking for a partner to work with us alongside a dedicated Network Rail project manager to run this event. This contract will act as a proof of concept, if this contract is successful, we will be looking to role this process out across the business to hold innovation events annually.

What will we expect?

• The Provider to act as our partner for innovation.
• The Provider to work closely with the Network Rail Project Manager to support the innovation drive. The Network Rail Project Manager will act as project lead.
• The Provider to help us host a Virtual Hackathon as part of a wider official Innovation Design Contest process to make sure solutions are implementable, successful and reach as many suppliers and individuals as possible.
• The Provider to be responsible for the overall planning, implementation, management, execution and administration of a Virtual Hackathon which will be held in July/August 2021, along with representing any successful individual that is not a corporate entity through the Design Contest to ensure ideas are developed and implemented. The challenge statements themselves have already been decided upon for this process.

If you are interested in participating in this process and finding out more, please email your organisations name, contact details and a very short introduction to Catherine Burgess on catherine.burgess@networkrail.co.uk . We will then send further information about the process.