Sloan Holds Enterprise Management Track Hackathon
Four teams of Enterprise Management track MBA students at Sloan School of Management competed in the second annual MIT Sloan Enterprise Management track hackathon. The hackathon serves as an opportunity for students to apply their classroom learning, which, in the Enterprise Management track, emphasizes a holistic approach to problem solving by integrating across functional domains.
This year’s competition focused on the severe parking problem that faces the cities of Boston. Participants designed solutions to the issue using smart technology. Proposed parking solutions incorporating smart technology had to fulfill the demands of visitors and residents while also accommodating limited city budgets.
Representatives from the cities of Boston and Newton, and management professionals from Cisco, IBM, and SAP, spent one day briefing the participating students. Students were advised on a broad set of considerations such as community/neighborhood issues, policy regulations, innovative technology, operations, and resource constraints.
On day one, students were trained in a design thinking approach to problem solving by representatives from SAP, a multinational software company. The students then had two days to devise their solutions to the parking situation. Each team shared its proposal in a brief elevator pitch followed by a 30-minute presentation and Q&A before a panel of judges.
The first-place team offered a product it called StreetSense, a proposed app that would rely on existing and new sensors at traffic lights and intersections to offer predictive analytics that would forecast “parking traffic.” An online search-and-pay approach would assist the end user in attempting to locate a parking space in the city.
The hackathon winning team was comprised of Bita Diomande, Alejandro Perez Sanchez, Robin Ganek, Clemens Mewald, and Alexander Boutelle, all MBA ’15. The runner-up team members were Brendan Mackoff, Abigail Wright, Shari Singh, Damian Hilsaca, and Zaahir Papar, all MBA ’15.
About the Author
Erin Purcell
Staff Writer, covering MetroMBA's news beat for New York, Philadelphia, and Boston.
