Sustainable Futures Hackathon

Overview

As a part of Ashurst's commitment to innovation, sustainability and collaborating with our clients and partners, Ashurst Advance teamed up with BRYTER (our no code technology development partner) to host the Sustainable Futures Hackathon at the McLaren Technology Centre. Hackathons work to kickstart collaboration as they bring minds together on specific challenges in order to create solutions in a focussed, experimental and time-boxed way.

This two-day hackathon focused on core sustainability issues. At Ashurst we are on a mission to enable our clients, our partners and ourselves to explore innovative ways to achieve this goal. Finding solutions to one of the world's greatest problems requires the right minds to come together and be given the time and space for out-of-the-box thinking, challenge and reflection. The problem statements we identified included; supply chain decarbonization, decarbonization of buildings, the gathering of sustainability data, organizational carbon footprint tracking, and overall community impact. Teams were formed on the day and included a number of Ashurst clients, as well as representative from all Ashurst divisions from Partner to Trainees.

Winning team

Team Hunt (aptly named after legendary McLaren driver James Hunt) came up with the winning concept. The team focused on the decarbonisation of buildings and developed a tool to enable them to make an informed and responsible decision to either re-build or retrofit, depending on an assessment criteria, that takes into account environmental, social and governance factors.

Second Place

Coming in close second place was Team Lauda. They chose to focus on the struggles of using data to set out and embed sustainability objectives. The solution named SCIENZ (Supply chain information enabling net zero) tackled the issue of gathering net zero information from your suppliers, the product was designed to gather, store and report on supply chain data in respect of the Net Zero ESG pillar.

Looking forward

Rome wasn't built in a day, and as fantastic as the concepts and products our teams designed are, there is significant work to be done post the event to explore how Ashurst can collaborate with our clients, sustainability partners and industry groups to develop these into tangible solutions. To build on these ideas Ashurst will run a combination of workshops, sprints and discovery sessions to identify the scale of opportunities. We will also continue to regularly hold hackathons globally to create prototypes for tools and address the key challenges facing our clients.