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Atomic Sky Facilitates Marketing Hackathon at Curtin University

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Curtin University recently held its first marketing hackathon to develop inventive ways to inspire future students to choose Curtin as a place of innovation and academic excellence.

Atomic Sky facilitated the two-day hackathon, bringing together multi-skilled teams comprising of teaching and IT staff from across the University, current Curtin and high school students and agency partners to generate unique solutions to the common barriers associated with choosing where to study.

There has been a marked increase in interest in startups from large organisations as they seek to understand the processes and methodologies they use. The idea of a marketing hackathon is to use startup methodology and techniques to rapidly generate a range of ideas, then to validate those ideas on customers and hopefully come away with a new idea that can be implemented.
The hackathon was facilitated by Andy Lamb and his team at Atomic Sky. Andy said he was eager to be involved after being approached by the marketing team:

“We were extremely excited when approached by Curtin Marketing as we love working with larger organisations to bring startup thinking to help solve their problems. A hackathon is a great way to start and we look forward to supporting Curtin’s journey wherever possible into the future.”

Some of the ideas generated from the hackathon tackled issues of helping minimise the stress students’ face when completing Year 12 study, selecting high school subjects, university courses or careers, and providing tailored events for high school students.

Ty Hayes, Chief Marketing Officer, who drove the initiative with the help of a small hack team, said it was an example of how the University was using start-up processes to generate new ideas and strategies.

“The idea of the marketing hackathon is how do we use that start-up methodology and processes to rapidly test some ideas on our customers, generate break-through thinking, and come out of it with new ideas that can be implemented quickly,” Mr Hayes said.

“It’s about embracing an agile marketing approach where faster is better, it’s okay to fail so long as you fail fast and learn from it, you validate your assumptions with customers and put the status quo to one side.”

“Universities are traditionally conventional organisations where change takes years to be implemented. With the Hackathon, we were able to accelerate the design and development of new ideas over two days to such a degree that we had multiple test websites built, channel plans developed, and initiatives practically ready to launch.”

 

John Driscoll, Chairman and CEO at Marketforce was on-hand to judge the event.

“The diversity and quality of ideas generated demonstrated how a traditional marketing problem can be resolved quickly and effectively across a broad range of marketing platforms using innovative thought processes.”

Mr Hayes said that the feedback from the event has been amazing and he was looking forward to working with his team to take the best ideas and get them to market as quickly as possible.

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Startup News has been the home of West Australian startup news and events since 2013. We publish several news stories, interviews, tips and events relating to WA startups every week, with over 1,900 articles in our archives. We also produce the 'Startup West' podcast, and host the 'Hubs (Ecosystem)' database of WA startup programs, places and events.
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