Cornerstone Hackathon is backathon: See the 2022 winners

In today’s world, there’s no shortage of applications for technology in our daily lives. Hackathons are a fantastic way for diverse teams to merge their creative ideas. Working together, they can build the newest technological solutions and innovations that enhance our future-ready workplaces worldwide.

At Cornerstone, hackathons provide 24 hours for teams of six to complete a hack. A hack can be anything from a solution to a new process or a feature that improves efficiency or increases diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB).

Cornerstone Hackathon 9.0 proved to be an extraordinary opportunity for Cornerstars to bring a wide range of creativity between cross-functional and culturally diverse teams. This year’s teams highlighted the overflowing ingenuity and innovation that exemplifies our dedication to improving the productivity, efficiency and overall quality of work now and in the future.

This year’s Hackathon 9.0 consisted of unique themes, including:

Five winners prevailed at Hackathon 9.0. This year’s first-place Hackathon 9.0 winner was Automatic Content Quality Check, which improved the quality of “content as product” by automatically creating vital metadata for our customer videos within CyberU. Team Automatic Content Quality Check’s hack not only improves efficiencies but also drives value for our customers navigating video production metadata worldwide.

The second-place award went to team CEBO Mini, who created a helpful AI to expedite and mitigate user experience issues within the SumTotal mobile application by providing real-time help to the end user. This clever hack enables logs and opens a case on the user's behalf while providing troubleshooting solutions and even a tech support ticket for more complex issues.

Team F1 created an excellent hack using the F1 keyboard button as a shortcut to access a wider variety of shortcuts specific to Cornerstone training that might be more easily accessible to those who are visually impaired. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports, “Globally, at least 2.2 billion people have a near or distance vision impairment.” Thus, Team F1’s solution widened the breadth of Cornerstone customers and provided a space for a part of the world’s population that might otherwise be left out or forgotten.

Team Sapient Caliber’s Skills Tree created a new way of categorizing workplace skills and viewing personal development that set people up for further career advancement in today’s fast-changing world. By reframing career skills, this team envisioned a future ready workplace by defining durable, semi-durable and perishable skills rather than hard and soft skills.

To combat the growing habit of multitasking, team Code Prodigy’s Miniviewer developed an innovative way for Cornerstone training videos to follow users outside the tab with a pop-out window that allows for a continuous viewing experience, even outside Cornerstone training sites. The newly hacked miniviewer can increase the viewing times and learning retention rates for Cornerstone modules, broadening the positive impacts of Cornerstone products and materials for every organization.

With all the competitors at this year’s Hackathon 9.0, it’ll be exciting to see what the next 12 months will reveal as we continue to work towards increasing diverse innovations.