Brainstorming brings flood of ideas

When European online DVD rental site Lovefilm.com decided earlier this year that it needed to improve its internal systems through innovation, chief operating officer William Reeve opted for an American-style brainstorming session as the best way to meet this goal.

Reeve founded UK firm Screen Select in 2003. Three years later, his company merged with Lovefilm, and Reeve is now responsible for managing the firm’s IT systems in the UK and a number of other European countries. It was in the UK that Lovefilm held its first hackathon. Reeve said one of the drivers for the move was the need to take stock of the company’s IT capabilities following a period of rapid growth.

“We borrowed the idea from the States,” Reeve said. “Initially, we were a small startup, but now we have a big technology team. Because of this, we needed to know how best to manage the team. We had lost some of our entrepreneurial edge and wanted to take a day out of work to focus on a number of issues, solutions and new initiatives. The team had plenty of ideas and we wanted to see what we could achieve with a short burst of creativity and activity.”

Reeve describes a hackathon as an informal meeting where members discuss problems and solutions with the aim of inspring collaborative development. Reeve said participation was purely voluntary ­ an arrangement that ensured the company could leave a skeleton support team on its IT helpdesk.

Nevertheless, Reeve admitted that taking resources from the UK IT team out of daily operations was risky. “It was a gamble, taking away the team for a day. It might not have been something that the rest of the business would have wanted. The management team was a little nervous, but next time around we expect to get a lot more support. The ideas are so good that everyone is excited about it.”

In the end, there were no problems on the day and about 10 solutions were chosen for further development, many of which were for the Lovefilm web site. These included a mobile application that lets users interact with the site using SMS, and a traffic light system that is used internally to let staff know how well areas of the site are performing.

“The hackathon was designed to encourage the creation of solutions, rather than give people something to do, and was very useful. I am surprised that we are the first people to do this in the UK.”

However, Reeves conceded that a hackathon might not work for all organisations. “We have a very big development staff, you need to be over a certain size to make these things work.”