The Sustainable Finance Hack 2024, organized by Open Geneva in the SDG Solution Space in Geneva, brought together a community of more than 50 passionate individuals to tackle real-world challenges linked to sustainable finance. 

Giga, the joint ITU-UNICEF initiative to connect every school to the Internet by 2030 was one of the 7 challenge owners, presenting their multifaceted innovation challenge: "Financing Digital Infrastructure for Schools: Overcoming Risk to Unlock Opportunity" 

Read along to discover Giga's unique experience collaborating with diverse participants to examine a familiar issue through a fresh lens, leveraging new perspectives and approaches.

Process over Product for Long-Term Innovation

Giga's challenge of sustainably financing digital infrastructure for schools is typically addressed by traditional players like governments and development finance institutions. The Sustainable Finance Hack took a different approach, bringing together a diverse group of non-experts and students to explore innovative solutions for this complex, niche issue.

Yannick Heiniger, Partnerships Lead for Giga at the ITU and a key member of Giga's hackathon team, was on-hand throughout the event to guide the participants. Initially surprised and slightly challenged by the diverse group, Yannick soon discovered the power of empowering them to fully grasp and take ownership of the problem: "It required patience, adaptation, and flexibility to allow participants to understand the challenge and make it their own. By building on participants' insights rather than imposing pre-conceived solutions, we were able to uncover unique perspectives on our challenge."

Yannick Heiniger, Partnerships Lead for Giga at the ITU

Over the intense 24 hours of the hackathon, the team shared ideas and challenged assumptions. While the end solution was important, Yannick believes the true value lay in the collaborative process itself. By engaging with the diverse participants, Giga gained new diverse perspectives on how to reframe and communicate their challenge’s complexity more effectively: “The collaboration equipped us with a new language to make people understand the complexity of the challenge we faced. If anything, the hackathon enabled us to go home with better-framed questions, rather than definitive solutions - which is crucial for long-term innovation,” explained Yannick.

The team of participants brainstorming solutions to tackle Giga's challenge

Beyond the Innovative Solution: A New Approach to Understand Global Digital Connectivity

Truly making the challenge their own, the participants adopted a bottom-up approach to shape their final solution. They developed a community platform to empower remote communities and unlock quality connectivity. Entitled the COCO (Community Connect Platform), this collaborative platform was designed to connect those who have successfully overcome connectivity challenges with those still struggling, by facilitating knowledge sharing, collaboration, and targeted assistance.

Yannick was intrigued by the participants' unconventional approach to tackling the challenge, and he discovered the importance of being open to unexpected outcomes. As he says, "Innovation is often the result of mixing existing ingredients differently, more than inventing new ones. The participants challenged us to break down the challenge into specific parts, and their solution offered a new understanding of global connectivity challenges. It's essential to be comfortable with the idea that the outcomes of the hackathon will be different than those expected, but seek to make them reliable in an innovative manner." 

Moving forward, Giga will continue to embrace collaborative approaches and leverage collective intelligence. Inspired by the success of Open Geneva's Sustainable Finance Hack, Giga will harness the creativity of hackathon methodology, making it a core part of the experience for visiting stakeholders at the upcoming Connectivity Centre in Geneva, Giga’s headquarters. As Yannick notes: "Open Geneva has gained a unique reputation for accelerating innovation through its multidisciplinary hackathons. As we launch the Giga Connectivity Centre, we will leverage this proven approach to inspire creativity and drive innovation among our stakeholders."

The team of participants presenting their innovative solution

Want to discover more? Go behind the scenes with Giga and their hackathon team in this video!