This month we held our first ever Globe’athon, with colleagues and partner companies coming together all over the world to hack.

This month we held our first ever Globe’athon, with colleagues and partner companies coming together all over the world to hack. It’s an intense 24-hour marathon solution production challenge involving technology, programming and design work.

With over 350 people and 50 odd teams taking part in the UK, Central Europe (Czech, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland), India, Thailand and South Korea, there was an extraordinary mix of skills and approaches which resulted in a superb spectrum of effort. People from all over the business including Blinkbox, Dotcom, Extra and Express stores and dunnhumby took part. This year, we were all challenged with producing something that makes customers’ lives easier.

The teams came together last Thursday and got cracking with their ideas and solutions. Some had never met before but many had already been talking on Yammer, our internal social network, pitching their ideas and finding team mates to help deliver on the solutions.

The winning UK team had actually never met before, but the original idea had been born on Yammer and the team formed around it. Antony, a Customer Delivery Assistant for Tesco.com, had a lot of great ideas and together we worked on one rough idea and then threw it out to the group.

The Globe-athon was a rollercoaster ride. It was great to see things finally come together, and even better to come 1st in the UK!  The experience was particularly rewarding because we were such a diverse team - Antony is a Customer Delivery Assistant, Jerome is a designer, Maria is a research engineer and I was the developer.  By the end of the 24 hours we had a fairly compelling business and a technical mock-up.  I know you’ll be keen to hear more about the idea itself but we’re not at a stage where I can share anything just yet! What I can tell you is that it focuses on a new way of delivering groceries to customers (no, not drones)…watch this space.

It was an exhausting 24 hours, but it was a great feeling to know that we could create something in such a short space of time. It was great to think of our team as a microcosm of what innovation at Tesco is moving towards.

  • Luke Hickton is Lead Innovation Development Manager on Tesco’s Innovation Team and was a member of the winning Globe’athon team