With the recent opening of The Vernon Innovation & Entrepreneur Workspace (The VIEW), Accelerate Okanagan will be hosting the first North Okanagan Talent Hackathon on Thursday, October 29, 2020. It will be held virtually to maintain COVID-19 health and safety standards.

This hackathon is all about collaboration and ideation. Solutions and prototypes can come alive in a matter of hours using a process called Design Thinking. You don’t have to be a developer or know how to code to participate. This experience is open to all who are wanting to learn to create an innovative mindset.

The North Okanagan Talent Hackathon is just over a week away, so we want to give you a sneak peek into what you can expect from the event.

Meet Your Challenge

This will be the problem that teams are seeking to solve. The nature of the solution is entirely up to the team itself, and it will be up to the team to demonstrate exactly how their solution addresses the problem in an effective and unique way.

Meet Your Facilitator

Rocky Ozaki is the visionary behind NoW of Work Inc. and is a master facilitator behind the North Okanagan Talent Hackathon. Having held executive roles in both large enterprise and startup tech, Rocky is a rare talent who truly understands the challenges companies face today. Rocky is deeply entrenched in the Canadian tech-sector, having previously held the role of Vice-President Community & Head of Corporate Innovation for the BC Tech Association.

Rocky’s role during the North Okanagan Talen Hackathon will be to educate participants on Design Thinking and to guide them through the various stages of the hacking process.

Meet Your Keynote

Adam Smiley Poswolsky is a millennial workplace expert, motivational speaker, and author of The Quarter-Life Breakthrough and The Breakthrough Speaker. His third book, Friendship in the Age of Loneliness, will be published by Hachette in 2021. Smiley helps companies attract, retain, and empower millennial talent, and he has inspired thousands of professionals to be more engaged at work. His TEDx talk on “the quarter-life crisis” has been viewed more than 1.5 million times, and he has spoken in 15 countries about millennials, multigenerational engagement, and fostering connection and belonging in the workplace.

Smiley has spoken at companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Unilever, Deloitte, and Stanford University Graduate School of Business, and his work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Fast Company, Forbes, Cosmopolitan, CNN, and the World Economic Forum, among many other outlets.

Adam will be joining us virtually from his home in San Francisco. He will be sharing lessons he has learned and techniques we can bring back to our own workplaces.

Want to learn more about Adam? Check out his website here.

Want to participate as a hacker? Register here before October 23rd at 4:00pm.

Want to watch the finale pitch event? Register here.