What are you curious about?

Right now, I’m hoping you are curious about the content of this book – hackathons and how to create citizen-driven innovation. Furthermore, I hope you will let this book spark your curiosity to explore the possibilities of what you and your organization can do with the Dream! Hack! Build! method, and I hope that your curiosity is rooted in what your organization can accomplish and ultimately what impact it can have in the world. The book you are holding in your hand you see, is a guide to becoming a changemaker for the future.

Personally, I have found curiosity to be the number one most important driver for change and development for me no matter the context, in hackathons, and beyond – I would actually go so far as to call curiosity the driver for life itself. I have always been curious. I always wanted to do more, know more, be more, and explore the boundaries of what is possible. The human mind and the communication between us humans is what I have been most curious about during my life, and I still am today. Before we dive into hackathons and citizen-driven innovation, let me take you on a journey to set the stage for why this book is here, and how it is intrinsically joined with the concept of curiosity.

Apart from curiosity, communication intrigued me early on. My first memory of a dream job at the age of four was to be a mailman – I wanted to be the bringer of letters from people to other people, to be the one who delivered the connection between people across the distances in the world. As a little girl, I thought that being a mailman must be the best and most satisfying job in the world, what could be better and feel more purposeful than being the connector between people? Somehow, I think the invoices and bills that came through the mail were not a phenomenon that I, at age four, was aware of yet – to me all letters were good letters.

I didn’t become a mailman in my career, but the work I do today as Secretary General and CEO of Hack for Earth Foundation is grounded in the same desire that I had at four years old to bring people together – to connect people from across continents, bridging differences in nationalities, age, competence, careers, professions, social background, gender, and more aspects. I do it with the hackathon as a universal tool for creating understanding, building trust, and sparking curiosity – that in turn can lead to real innovation for a better future for us all.

My curiosity for the human mind brought me to study psychology for six years to become a clinical psychologist, and for almost 10 years after that, I had the privilege of working with people who sought help in clinical psychiatry. This extensive experience of psychotherapy, psychological assessment, psychological testing, and psychiatric diagnosis gave me invaluable knowledge of the human mind, and I am forever grateful to the hundreds of patients who trusted me enough to share their life stories with me. I loved my work, but I was not meant to stay in clinical psychiatry it turned out. After a few years working at the local Swedish Public Employment Service in Bromölla in the south of Sweden, I found myself at the Head Office of the Swedish Public Employment Service in Stockholm in 2017.

Here is where there was a sudden plot twist that incidentally brought me, a psychologist, to the hackathon world – a world that is very far from the known waters of psychology. A plot twist is often sudden and unexpected, and this one definitely was that!

Participating in my first hackathon ever, an in-person hackathon event organized by the Digital Innovation Center at the Swedish Public Employment Service at their Head Office in Stockholm in the spring of 2017, I was completely and utterly smitten with the hackathon as a phenomenon. I fell in love with the openness to new ideas, the fast innovation process, the excitement in the air, the connecting and learning with new people with different backgrounds than mine, and the dedicated focus on action – and all of it taking place in an arena that breathed inclusivity, participation, equality, and curiosity in each and every one of its molecules. It was heaven.

I had found my place in the world, and I had to try to get a job working with hackathons! Keep in mind this was the Digital Innovation Center at a public government agency and I was a psychologist working at a completely different department at the time – I did not fit the profile at all. To make quite a long story short – I did apply for a job there and instead of laughing at my lack of competence within digitalization, the manager asked me what I could do, seeing my background as a psychologist as a potential asset and not a liability. He was curious to see what I could do. This taught me to always look to hire people with the right attitude, engagement, and personality traits (including curiosity of course), not the perfect curriculum vitae or formal education background. The effects of hiring the not obvious choice can be hard to foresee, but if you are curious, you will do it. As it turns out, it’s all about people, and with the right people anything is possible.

I was appointed Head Project Manager of the Government mission, Hack for Sweden, and the rest is as they say history. The synergy effects of my, in this context, odd perspective as a psychologist paired with the Hack for Sweden mission and team members, was evident. Exploring the hackathon method together with my team members during the Hack for Sweden years was a time of fast expansion and learning from trial and error. As we together created a space where exploration of the method was fun and playful, finding the blueprint to Dream! Hack! Build! was still a serious undertaking with an important grander purpose of making an impact on our future.

Hack for Sweden grew into a movement for citizen-driven innovation in less than two years. We crafted the Dream! Hack! Build method as we went along, and it was time to go global. I founded the Hack for Earth Foundation in 2021, and we organized our first global Hack for Earth hackathon in the fall of 2021. The first batch of winners entered the newly created Build for Earth acceleration program in early 2022, and we are publishing this first book on the method in 2024.

After my many years of service as an employee in a large public organization, I have learned too well that it was often difficult to take action for several reasons – something that is a reality in many large organizations, maybe yours as well. This is where I find the hackathon method to be like a breath of fresh air and extremely effective: the participants in a hackathon are forced to take action, and in a fun exercise, in merely hours or a few days, tangible results are born. The possibilities seem endless to take the hackathon method into new areas of business, to innovate, bring people together, and more importantly to create a movement and platform where people can take action. This is only the beginning.

So, there you have it: The story of how the Dream! Hack! Build! method was born, and in this book, we will walk you through how you can employ this game-changer in innovation for the benefit of your organization. I’m curious to see where this journey takes us from here, and even more curious to see where it takes you and your organization!

Figure P.1 – The author and the co-authors of this book; from left: Mustafa Sherif, Ann Molin, Love Dager, Carolina Emanuelson, and Dr. Kristofer Vernmark