The word hackathon is keeping the right people out

What people hear

Say the word hackathon to a designer, a business student, a lawyer, a doctor. Most of them hear the same thing: that's for IT people. Not for me.

It starts with the narrative. If an event sounds like an IT bubble, everyone outside that bubble stays home. Designers. Economists. Legal minds. Scientists. Fields with far more balance, full of people who would make these events better.

Not just welcome. Needed.

The best builds I have seen did not come from teams of four coders. They came from mixed teams, where domain knowledge met technical skill. A doctor on a health case. An architect on a construction case. Someone who has lived the problem, next to someone who can build the solution.

The format outgrew its name

These weekends stopped being coding contests years ago. Teams ship working products for real companies now, in 36 hours. The word just never caught up.

That is why we say innovation sprint. Not as a rebrand of the same thing, but as a more honest description of what actually happens in the room.

Why we're called sprintd

People ask us why the company is called sprintd. This is why. The sprint is the unit everything is built around: a short, intense run where different minds build something real together.

Everyone deserves to feel invited. The name is where that starts. If that sounds like you, even if you have never written a line of code, our next sprint is this October in Zurich.