To celebrate International Day of the Girl, Deloitte organised a Girls Hackathon, featuring over 100 young women aged 18-23 doing four challenges, one of which was hosted by Janssen EMEA. The girls who took part were tasked with coming up with a patient-focused solution for a healthcare challenge set by our team at Janssen. with the winning team devising a multifaceted app for patients that assesses and tracks their emotional needs, connects them to other patients and provides them with medical support and advice.

Reflections from the judge

We were very impressed by what we saw: a lot of very interesting ideas that were spot on in terms of what the pharma industry is looking at and in terms of what we’re trying to achieve with some of our projects here at Janssen.

What struck me about the winners, aside from their fresh and creative ideas, was their ability to empathise with their target users. Empathy is now seen as the key skill of the future and is definitely needed to drive innovation in an organisation and it was very nice then to see them embrace it with their ideas.

The most interesting concepts were able to really identify a specific group of users: for example, patients or family, and address their needs. We saw really nice and structured presentations that brought these ideas to life.

A big thank you to the girls participating, to the organising team, as well as to our product owners. We were delighted to see the rich conversations and collaboration between people from many cultural backgrounds, and we hope that everyone who participated enjoyed taking part as much as we did.