Nationwide's focus on helping connected businesses received the attention of a few hacking teams, and we saw many different takes on how that could show up in a market.(Photo: Shutterstock)

As a larger insurance and financial services company, Nationwide loves to do cool things. No, seriously.

And we know cool things often come from hackathons — an innovation-focused event that invites designers, programmers and entrepreneurs from all walks life together to create concepts to help address a particular challenge.

Sure, we here at Nationwide had done plenty of things internally that produced some really good stuff, but would it make sense to invite complete strangers to tackle challenges to help our members? They don't know much about our company and almost nothing about the complexities of insurance and financial services. Would we be willing to try solutions that weren't identified through the traditional ways we do things?

As part of our Innovation@Nationwide effort, we gave it a shot.

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A hack of an idea

About a year ago, Erik Ross, who leads Nationwide's venture capital investments in innovation, and I proposed that Nationwide should host a hackathon on the West Coast. Our partners at Plug and Play tech centers offered their location and connected us with an event coordinator, Angel Hack, which made it easy for us to manage logistics and marketing of an event 2,500 miles away. The excitement was high back in Ohio and a team of us were in Sunnyvale, Calif. to support, sponsor, observe and learn from our first external hackathon.

Ahead of the event, we knew it was a sell-out, but we didn't know exactly what that would mean. We had 111 eager, caffeinated hackers show up ready to develop novel ideas on Saturday morning. They learned about three business challenges we asked them to focus on. Twenty-eight hours later, 25 teams pitched their solutions that really highlighted the creativity that came together. We evaluated all of them and by 5 p.m. Sunday the winners had been named, group photos had been taken, and we sang the oh-so-catchy "On Your Side" jingle with the grand prize-winning team on stage. Speaking for the team that was there, the event exceeded our expectations.

Some registered as teams ahead of the event, others joined a team that first morning. Nationwide hosted expert-led breakouts for each of the challenges after lunch and our team on-site answered questions throughout. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was another partner, and there were no issues with the cloud or the Nationwide APIs our hackers used to help bring their ideas to life.

We saw a more diverse crowd than we had expected. There were hackers who needed an ID to prove they were at least 18, and hackers that had already spent a career doing something other than hacking. We had many hackers from Silicon Valley but also ones who traveled from places like New York and even Singapore. There were hackers who worked for big tech companies and others who were independent. We weren't surprised that our hackers were mostly men, but happy to see many women. 

In a few weeks, the four winning teams will come to Columbus, Ohio and re-pitch those ideas to other Nationwide executives at our corporate headquarters. Between now and then, we'll be reaching out to the other teams that had at least something in an idea that we hadn't seen or thought of before.