Great energy, no route through
Plenty of organisations run excellent innovation days. What is often missing is the path from demo to decision, so promising work goes back into a queue behind everything that was already there.
AI Fluency · Organisational layer
Turn your teams' ideas into outcomes, in days rather than quarters.
Your people know where the friction is. We run the event around a real challenge your executives set and judge, in weeks not a quarter, and stay through the weeks after. If you are not ready, we say so.
One of three Otinga programmes, with AI Strategy and AI Dividend. The same team ran a leading bank’s 2,900-registration hackathon and impact.com’s largest AI engineering event to date.
Why this exists
The event is rarely the hard part. The week after is.
The ideas were never the constraint
The people closest to the work know where the friction is. What they need is a route to act on it, and a reason to believe acting on it leads somewhere.
Momentum is worth protecting
Each event that ends in a decision makes the next one easier to fill. We design for that, because your people’s willingness to lean in is one of the most valuable things you have.
What we do
Designed, run and followed through
Scale the ambition
We take AI out of the central team and put it in the hands of the people who know the work. The format is built so participation is genuinely worth your teams’ time.
Accelerate what is running
We unblock stalled initiatives in days, not quarters. Sometimes the most valuable outcome is not a new idea but an existing one finally being executed.
Innovate in hours, not months
Hackathons built around a challenge that matters to your business, judged against criteria your executives set, with follow-through designed in from the start.
A portfolio of outcomes, not one winner
Our events surface radical ideas, systemic improvements to how work gets done, and a host of mini-vations: small, practical changes that add up to real impact. All three are worth having.
Formats we run
Internal enterprise hackathons
Your people, your challenges, your judging panel.
Co-innovation events
Run alongside your clients or partners on a shared problem.
Talent acquisition hackathons
Meet engineers through real work rather than another interview loop.
Agentathons and promptathons
Shorter, sharper formats focused on AI agents and applied prompting.
Virtual, in person or hybrid. Our virtual events run in a purpose-built venue rather than a grid of video calls, which is a large part of why people stay for the whole thing.
How it runs
Four phases, and the last one is the point
1
Design
We define the challenge with your executives, set success criteria and the judging rubric, plan participation, and recruit mentors and judges.
2
Build
Applications, screening, team formation, communications and platform setup. Innovation at scale should be simple, so this runs on our platform rather than on your team’s spreadsheets.
3
Run
Professional facilitation across the event: mentors, judging, logistics and momentum. Your people get to mentor and observe rather than administrate.
4
Follow through
The phase most programmes skip. We support the winning teams, track progress against milestones, and report back to the executives who sponsored it.
What you leave with
What you leave with
- 01Working prototypes against a challenge your executives set
- 02A scored and ranked portfolio of ideas with the judging rationale attached
- 03Structured observations on how your people collaborate under real pressure
- 04A follow-through plan for what won, with owners and dates
- 05An experience your teams will talk about, which does more for your employer brand than a campaign
In the media
In the media · Nedbank
1,200 registrations. 50 finalists. Offers on the day.
Nedbank ran the N*ovation Data & Analytics Masters to find and hire South Africa’s most advanced data practitioners, with Otinga as facilitation and platform partner alongside OfferZen, Zindi and Microsoft. Otinga structured the Data Engineering track and the end-to-end challenge design.
- 1,200+ registrations nationally
- Four weeks of asynchronous virtual competition
- Two tracks: Data Engineering and Machine Learning / Data Science
- 50 finalists invited to an invite-only finale at Nedbank’s Johannesburg headquarters
- R500,000+ prize pool
- Top performers received letters of intent on the day as part of a live hiring pathway
The Data Engineering track was built as a production-style pipeline challenge that changed under the competitors, testing maintainability, scalability and efficiency as requirements shifted. That is not a puzzle. That is the job. A CV cannot show you how someone handles a moving brief.
Read the full story As featured in IT Online
In the media · impact.com
250 engineers. One day. Their largest AI engineering event ever.
impact.com brought its global engineering organisation to Cape Town for the TTP Tech Hackathon as part of its Developer Summit. Otinga was facilitation and platform partner, translating strategic objectives into challenge framing, team workflows and execution pathways.
- 250+ engineers, product managers and technical leaders in one room
- One-day build sprint, 23 April 2026, Cape Town
- Run against real product challenges, not sandbox exercises
- Built on the tooling teams actually use, including Cursor and Gemini
- The largest AI-focused engineering event impact.com has held
Working with Otinga allowed us to structure that process in a way that moved teams from ideas to execution quickly, while still maintaining a high bar for impact. The result is not just prototypes, but a clearer path to how AI can accelerate productivity across our engineering organisation.
Most AI adoption is demos and slides. If your AI story does not change what your engineers ship at scale, it is theatre. The measure is output, not enthusiasm.
Read the full story As featured in AI Impact
Who it is for
Heads of Innovation, Data and AI.
Executive sponsors who want visible proof the organisation can move.
Talent leaders in a market where everyone is approached weekly.
Business unit leaders with a problem that has been stuck for a while.
FAQs
Common questions
How is this different from the hackathon we already ran internally?
Follow-through, and executives set the challenge and criteria first.
Virtual, in person, or hybrid, which should we run?
Virtual reaches more people; in person suits teams who rarely meet. We usually recommend hybrid.
How much of our people's time does this actually take?
The event, plus a few hours’ prep for mentors and judges.
What does this cost?
No rate card, price depends on format and scale. The scoping call ends with a defined shape and cost.
What happens to the ideas, or candidates, that do not win?
They stay yours, scored and ranked.
What if our executives cannot agree on the challenge or criteria in advance?
The most common reason a hackathon slips, and what Phase 1 solves.
Both results you show are hiring outcomes. Is this actually about building AI capability?
Yes: hiring results carry a named citation, but both use the same rubric and Phase 4.
