The New Zealand Government did. There was a Hackathon last weekend around a bunch of problems that various government departments wanted to have solved.
The people at the hackathon have has a week since to get their teams together and pitches for the next stage.
The pitches are to the government department CEs, so people just under the ministers.
If the pitch is accepted, then we get 3 months (paid) to be put though a Tech Accelerator (run by CreativeHQ) in Wellington and get the application in a state to be used. During which time the teams will form companies, get advice for how to run things, and have the government departments domain experts on hand to answer any questions we need and get feedback from them.
At the end we get to demo our solutions to the departments. If they like them, then they will licence the results, and we have a bunch of new tech companies in New Zealand, with an existing cash flow.
Seriously, this is it done right. Small companies / groups of developers (and designers, etc) get chances at solving problems which would normally go to the big guys in the industry.
My team is presenting their pitch (Machine learning to help route problem tickets in various call centres) just after lunch today - I'm nervous as all hell :)
The people at the hackathon have has a week since to get their teams together and pitches for the next stage.
The pitches are to the government department CEs, so people just under the ministers.
If the pitch is accepted, then we get 3 months (paid) to be put though a Tech Accelerator (run by CreativeHQ) in Wellington and get the application in a state to be used. During which time the teams will form companies, get advice for how to run things, and have the government departments domain experts on hand to answer any questions we need and get feedback from them.
At the end we get to demo our solutions to the departments. If they like them, then they will licence the results, and we have a bunch of new tech companies in New Zealand, with an existing cash flow.
Seriously, this is it done right. Small companies / groups of developers (and designers, etc) get chances at solving problems which would normally go to the big guys in the industry.
My team is presenting their pitch (Machine learning to help route problem tickets in various call centres) just after lunch today - I'm nervous as all hell :)
--- Blair