April 23, 2018
Over a 24-hour period, Ashesi’s Norton-Motulsky Hall became a hub for ideation and problem solving as 40 juniors took part in Ignite’19, the inaugural Business Administration hackathon. The event focused on guiding juniors to address real world problems leading up to their final year capstone projects and theses.
“Leading up to their final year, we realized some students needed some guidance in fleshing out ideas for relevant projects to take on,” explained William Annoh, Business Administration Coordinator. “So we put this together to fuel collaborations among the academic departments and across different majors, help with collaborations on capstone projects, enhance team formation for the Entrepreneurship capstone and thus making the capstone experience more relevant.”
With support from the Stanbic Business Incubator, the Ashesi D:Lab, the Ashesi Venture Accelerator and the Ashesi Enterprise Fund, the hackathon provided the platform for juniors across different majors to work together through collaboration, to explore problem spaces and develop business models for solutions through brainstorm sessions, mini-workshops and business pitches.
“The hackathon was very useful,” he said “Participants not only explored problems in the various thematic areas they selected, but participated in workshops on market research, the macro-economic space in Ghana and interacted with resource personnel who gave them feedback on their effort. The focus on problems allowed participants to extensively explore their various problem spaces which were based mainly on the Sustainable Developmental Goals, and from observed areas of interest that we see start-ups focusing on.”
For the juniors who participated in the hackathon, the opportunity to streamline problems they have been tinkering on, and to form teams with like-minded students helped put projects into perspective.
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