Hackathons—and the meaningful strategic partnerships they can spark—help the Veterans Affairs Department turn innovation that only seems imaginable into reality, a VA official said Tuesday.
At the Veteran Health Administration’s second annual Innovation Experience event in Washington, Suzanne Shirley, an entrepreneur-in-residence through the VHA’s Innovation Ecosystem, highlighted some of the impacts the solution-centered hacks have inspired over the last year.
“How through innovation can we achieve the extraordinary?” Shirley asked. “It’s a question I ask myself every day. But it’s more than a question—it’s a quest, it’s a journey.”
With a decade of experience driving process improvement and innovation across the agency, Shirley was one of several insiders to shed light on the cutting-edge approaches stakeholders are taking to drive powerful solutions for America’s vets and those who serve them. Hackathons, she explained, are fast-paced events or “design sprints,” that bring together hundreds of problem-solvers from diverse professional and academic backgrounds. Together, they form teams to solve specific challenges over the course of what usually spans just a few days.
The agency has led many individual hackathons over the years, but as EIR, Shirley helped launch a broader national initiative to partner with academic institutions and introduce VA-centered events in major cities across the nation.
“We can’t do this alone. Achieving extraordinary results means working with extraordinary people, extraordinary partners,” Shirley said. “So around this time last year, I called on [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology], [Georgia Institute of Technology] and George Washington University, and I asked them to help us explore some of our most complex challenges. Within a few days, I was on a plane, entering their world of imagination.”
VHA formed strategic partnerships with the universities and also engaged inn ..
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