30th of October was the grand finale for the second X-industry hackathon where 15 companies in a close collaboration found solutions for industry issues. As organisers and participiants admit – the hackathon gives an excellent environment for collaboration between industries and gives the right input to invest in digitalization as the future for company growth.
The autumn batch took place on October 2-30th, for 4 weeks solving crucial business challenges, including the automatisation of the renting of the construction tools, 3D construction model generation and digitilisation of marketing processes of gas stations. The challenges were served by AS “Sadales tīkls”, SIA “Forta PRO”, SIA “Inducont”, SIA “Stats Serviss”, SIA “Geksans”, Latvian Association of Real Estate Deals and Children's Clinical University Hospital, while the challenges were solved by SIA “Datorzinību centrs”, SIA “Burti”, SIA “Datamed”, SIA “AndIT Solutions”, SIA “Mappost”, SIA “Gstream” un SIA “Autentica”.
As Raimonds Zariņš, an Electroengineer at AS “Sadales tīkls” notes: “The hackathon was a great opportunity to see what happens outside the walls of our company. Not always in the daily routine there is enough time and chances to gain knowledge what we obtained here in a short period of time. For a company of our size it was important that the business challenge was solved fast and with quality, additional benefit was a view from aside and the ability of IT companies to come up with original solutions.”
X-industry hackathon is a beginning for a larger cross-industry initiative, created by Latvian IT Cluster, with a goal to help companies find digital solutions and develop faster towards the success. In the spring of 2019 the third batch of X-industry hackathon will take place, focusing on the digitalisation of companies in food industry.
The event was supported by the Ministry of Economics of Latvia, Nordic Council of Ministers’ Office in Latvia and European Development and Regional Fund project "Promotion of competitiveness and export capacity of IT industry" (project ID .3.2.1.1/16/A/004).
