The First SMASH Hackathon Winners Announced
29 Apr 2021
At the first ever SMASH Hackathon on 21-23 April, 12 teams from 7 different countries that had 48 hours to create solutions on how global sports could be more sustainable - from environmental and societal point of view.
The two Challenges were set by LADEC & Lahti - European Green Capital 2021 and Pajulahti & Finnish Paralympic Committee. In the Sport Sustainability Challenge the Challenge owners, LADEC and Lahti - European Green Capital 2021, a were looking for solutions that help to minimize the carbon footprint in international sports events and make them more sustainable.
In the Social Sustainability Challenge Pajulahti and Paralympic Committee seeked for solutions on how to make sports more accessible for people with disabilities with innovative training material distribution.
The participating teams were mentored throughout the hackathon by professional mentors from various fields. One of them mentioned that mentoring discussions with the teams were “exciting, instructive and invigorating” and that he learned a lot.
The Grand Finale of the virtual Hackathon was when the teams pitched their ideas and innovations to the panel of judges. The winners of the first SMASH Hackathon were Positive Impact with their idea of “Hiiliavain” tool and Team 10 with their versatile idea of using the Olympics as a platform to get more visibility to APA course.
- I am impressed about the number, internationality and enthusiasm of our participants. This first ever SMASH Hackathon was a success and definitely was not the be the last, rejoiced SMASH CEO Arto Ahola and continues:
- We'd like to thank all the participants, challenge owners and our partners. The concept of Hackathon and how it works was new to us and we couldn't organize this without our producers from Crazy Town. They did an amazing job and we learned a lot from them. Looking forward to the next SMASH Hackathon with them!
Huge congratulations to both winning teams and mega thanks also to all other participants!