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The Hackfestival 2024 is a highly anticipated tech event that took place in Mannheim between September 6-8. Under the motto “Decarbonize the Planet”, the festival aimed to bring together tech enthusiasts, sustainability experts, coders, and hackers to collaborate and innovate in sustainability related hands-on challenges during a full-weekend hackathon.
Located at Congress Center Rosengarten, it combined a competitive hackathon and free citizen track with a wide range of engaging activities for the greater public - including an exhibition area, workshops, open discussions and seminars. Participants had the opportunity to network with other tech talents and industry leaders, share their ideas, grow their career, test their skills and learn from each other.
Apart from that, the event was also a great opportunity to bring citizens closer to sustainability in general as well as individual corporate initiatives. As an event partner, we had many valuable exchanges around SAP’s own journey to net-zero and the SAP Sustainability product portfolio at our booth. It is always meaningful to see the interest in this topic, make a contribution and provide deeper insights into corporate sustainability and thus make it more tangible for a larger audience.
- Organized by The Hackathon Company – an independent European hackathon-as-a-service provider
- 300+ participants
- 35+ partners (Google, aws, Roche and more)
- 48-hours of hacking
- Six sustainability challenges
- Price pool of 10.000+ Euros
The event was kicked-off on Friday with an opening ceremony and inspiring speech by Alexander Gerst, who talked about his journey as an ESA astronaut followed by Christian Specht, mayor of the city of Mannheim. Gunther Rothermel, co-General Manager and Chief Product Officer for SAP Sustainability, and other industry channel partners were part of a fruitful panel discussion, giving insights about the corporate view on sustainability and how technology and innovation can help take climate action and make a difference in the world.
Gunther said: “With increasing regulatory landscapes and reporting requirements, our customers have set themselves a broad set of challenging sustainability targets...and we did the same at SAP. There is a lot we can address with software and smart approaches to embed sustainability into digital business processes...First we wanted to start by acting as an exemplar, working on our own emissions and journey to net-zero as a company...in the second step, we help our customers to become more sustainable and accompany them with our SAP Sustainability products. Imagine that SAP customers generate 87% of total global commerce....By integrating sustainability more naturally into customers transactions, we can have a huge impact on decarbonization, reduction of waste and more together. So, both these sides matter to us.”
The panel talk has clearly shown - at SAP, we incorporate sustainability in our strategy as well as our core values and are proud to have a strong internal SAP Community that engages in voluntary projects and lives sustainability in its daily actions, because every contribution, no matter how small, can change things.
According to this discussion, the focus of our sustainability effort is based on four key areas:
- Taking Climate Action and Reducing Carbon Emissions
- Establishing a Circular Economy to reuse material and avoid waste
- Integrating a Social Responsibility dimension to drive socially responsible value chains, promote respect for human rights, and create positive societal impacts.
- Holistic Steering & Reporting: Acting on the operational layer to be compliant and safe on the production and plant level as well as in company's own transactions and processes to be transparent on the way to net-zero.
Afterwards the different challenges were introduced and kicked off by the companies. The highly motivated participants had 48 hours to solve challenges provided by the “Challenge Setters” under the main topic “Decarbonize the Planet”. Divided into teams they started working on sustainability solutions, including design and business perspectives.
SAP' challenge: „𝐇𝐞𝐲, 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞’𝐬 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐛𝐨𝐧 𝐢𝐧 𝐦𝐲 𝐥𝐮𝐧𝐜𝐡🍴”:
We provided the following task: “As one-third of global emissions stem from the food system, imagine the impact that can be made by addressing this challenge head-on – especially when there’s the catering needs of over 110,000 employees. The challenge for the participants is to develop a digital solution that helps decarbonize the planet by reducing emissions within the food system or specifically targeting food waste.”
Heads were put together, many innovative ideas were developed and there were no limits to creativity. In the end, we received a lot of valuable ideas, and the following team was among the winners:
SAP challenge team: "FrostGuardians": Food waste comes from the fact that everyone wastes food every day, so with the help of AI and a camera, the team developed a fridge that manages what's in the fridge, gives tips on food that goes with a recipe and is connected to a shopping list.
One of the main goals of the festival was to foster creativity and problem-solving skills among participants and to encourage people to develop solutions with a positive social impact. Many attendees left the festival feeling inspired and motivated to continue their work in the tech industry.
The Hackfestival 2024 in Mannheim was a fantastic opportunity for tech enthusiasts to come together and push the boundaries of innovation. It provided a platform where like-minded individuals could collaborate and drive positive change.
It was a pleasure to support this event as a partner. A hackathon is a great opportunity to access collective knowledge, promote creativity and team spirit, resulting in digital applications and innovative ideas that sometimes can even be the start of something big.
There is only one thing left to say - A big thank you goes to the organizational team and all participants. Only together we can make a difference. 🌍 🌱
Please see the full list of all other winners' solutions (shared by Oliver Bruemmer, Founder & CEO The Hackathon Company):
Trash Buddy by Stadt Mannheim/ Metropolregion Rhein-Neckar: Scan products you want to throw away and get tips on what you can do with them. Find other solutions and don’t only throw it away.
Mannheim Green City Quest by Stadt Mannheim/ Metropolregion Rhein-Neckar: Playful knowledge transfer app that encourages young people to try out new ways of thinking and exploring the city in a sustainable way with geolocations and gamification elements.
Rochy - The Carbon Coach by Roche : "Rochy" gives sustainability reminders and awards points when fulfilled and proven with pictures, e.g. plate eaten empty. Collected points lead to coupons or can be donated.
Carbon Crasher by Schwarz IT KG: Machine learning app that recommends products based on your interests, such as products that save CO2 or have a short expiration date, with special prices, coupons and gamification.
KAEFER by KION Group: Efficient LLM model with key features: dynamic scoring of models, prompt model complexity matching, ML-based prompt categorization, self-learning architecture interaction.
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