People with great initiatives deserve a clear and smooth pathway to implement them on time. Also, people with not-so-great initiatives deserve fast yet meaningful feedback in order to iterate their projects or to simply drop the ball and move on with the next experiment. Sadly, neither of these situations normally happen in modern organizations.

Hence, what if we design an open and transparent system where new projects or initiatives submitted by people were approved by default? And where reviewers had the opportunity to provide constructive feedback as well as to pronounce for or against the project before a countdown ends? In such a system, if no response is given before the deadline, then there’s no impediment to go ahead with the initiative.

This could be a productive way to grasp the power of hackathon projects like this one or can be used at the final stage of innovation challenges/competitions run by organizations. Here are some first steps:

1) Talk to as many people as possible about the prospects of this idea and collect their feedbacks (try to not sell the idea, just listen to them in order to figure out if it might work or not).

2) If after those conversations, you think you have a good chance, then you can set up a low-tech prototype to test it out before investing time and other resources. Here are some definitions that could be useful at this stage:

a. Define which types of initiatives should be considered for this new practice. For example, all kinds of initiatives including general requests, such as office supply requests, or initiatives that pursue new ways to serve customers and peers.

b. Define the general prerequisites an initiative should meet in order to be submitted. For example, can people post early stage ideas or do they need to work it out a bit more (validate their assumptions, launch quick and cheap prototypes, etc.)?

c. Define who should act as reviewers (managers, co-workers, other stakeholders?)

d. Set countdowns based on the type and complexity of the initiatives to be submitted (i.e. 24 hours, 36 hours, 1 week, etc.)