The story about Skellefteå Kraft Hackathon - Track the Stack

In mid-December BioFuel Region (BFR) organized the Skellefteå Kraft hackathon – Track the Stack with the aim to find solutions for digitizing characteristics of large volumes of biomass used at a power plant.  This second hackathon, organized by BFR within the framework of the project BioBoosters, differed quite a lot from the first one. In this article, Eva Fridman from BioFuel Region, explores the lessons learned from the point of view of the organizing team. 

Organizing a hackathon in a distant city with a public company and many solution providers  

Track the Stack was initiated due to the challenges that Skellefteå Kraft, a large municipal energy company, faces regarding the biomass needed for the district heating grid in the City of Skellefteå. The urgency of challenge was the last years dramatically increase in price for forest biomass and revolved around the new demands of traceability of raw material and the optimization of flow of the biomass to avoid degradation during storage. The challenge is relevant for almost all power plants using biomass in Sweden and Finland.  

The biggest differences compared to the first hackathon was fourfold. The first being about handling the fact that Skellefteå Kraft is a public company, and rules about public procurement. The second one was that Skellefteå Kraft involved a lot of staff from different business areas both as mentors and jury and their project leader was closely connected to the management. This situation really facilitated the organization of the hackathon. The third thing was that we only got solutions from commercial companies and not from academia. The fourth was about the location. The hackathon took place in Skellefteå, situated approximately 120 kilometers from where BioFuel Region is located, and this made the practical arrangements and travels quite challenging.  

Skellefteå Kraft decided to invite eight of the solution providers for the final stage of the process. The quite large number of selected teams required a likewise large number of mentors. The partnership provided three valuable mentors, two from Finland and one from Germany, and Skellefteå Kraft eight. In total we had fourteen mentors, the rest coming from BioFuel Region and other parts of Sweden. During the mentoring session and the following dinner, it became obvious that the companies found complementary competence between each other and started discussing cooperation opportunities. No one could provide a complete solution to the challenge on their own. In the end, Elvenite, the same company that won the Valio hackathon in 2024, was appointed winner. Their solution will validate existing data and identify gaps and needs for additional data. 

Limitations in BioBooster’s international partnership 

All in all, we received twelve suggestions for solving the challenge, of which one came from Germany, two from Finland and the rest from Sweden. It is not a surprise that the international partnership in BioBooster struggles to provide relevant solution providers when it comes to forest biomass related challenges. Forestry is a core bioeconomy business in Sweden and Finland but the bioeconomy in the partnership is much more focused on agricultural related challenges.    

Success factors for a fruitful hackathon 

The most crucial factors for a successful hackathon are the commitment of the company that owns the challenge and to manage to reach out and attract solution providers from outside the challenge provider’s business network. Another practical thing is to have a very clear distribution of responsibilities between challenge provider and organizer. To organize a hackathon in your own town makes quite a lot of things much easier than having a distributed event.  

BioFuel Region has experienced the benefits of the BioBooster process and will continue to explore the opportunities to arrange future hackathons. But at the moment we do not have the financial conditions to offer this service. 

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