Introduction: Universal Principles of Value Creation from Experience
This year, I was invited to serve as a mentor for the KOSEN Intercollegiate Challenge hosted by SMBC Nikko Securities. KOSEN (Japan's National Colleges of Technology) are unique 5-year technical institutions that combine high school and college education, focusing on practical engineering skills. As a KOSEN graduate myself, it's a gratifying opportunity to provide value to my juniors. However, rather than offering mere technical advice, I wanted to convey essential value, which led me to write this article.
The principles I'll introduce here were derived from hackathon experiences, but they're universal thinking methodologies applicable to business presentations, product development, project proposals, job interviews, and any situation where you're being evaluated. Hackathons, with their constrained environments and clear feedback, provide an excellent laboratory for observing these principles in action.
I'm proud to say that I won nearly every hackathon I participated in during my student days. In one particular challenge, the task was "design and implement test code that meets specifications." While other participants were writing test code, I elevated my thinking one level higher and implemented a feature that automatically generates test code with just a click on specific UI elements. I read between the lines of the organizers' intentions, thinking they might want to reduce the time and cost of writing test code. This approach led to my victory.
This experience taught me that hackathon outcomes aren't determined by technical skill alone. What matters more is the ability to read evaluator psychology, insight to identify the real problem, and optimal allocation of limited resources.
In this article, I'll delve into practical strategies for maximizing your hackathon experience, drawing from my personal experiences and behavioral science insights. These concepts extend beyond hackathons to professional work and problem-solving in general.
Understanding Evaluators: The Psychology Behind Judgments
The first step to success in any evaluation context begins with "confirming the rules," "knowing who's evaluating," and "understanding their characteristics." This goes beyond superficial information gathering—it's about understanding the evaluator's psychology, biases, and decision-making patterns, all deeply rooted in behavioral science.
Whether they're hackathon judges, interviewers, supervisors, clients, or investors, all evaluators are human and thus incapable of completely objective assessment. Their judgments are influenced by various cognitive biases1.
Understanding these biases allows you to strategize for any evaluation scenario. Whether it's an interview, proposal presentation, or product development, the following approaches are effective:
- Frame your proposal in ways that align with the evaluator's goals and expectations to address confirmation bias
- Make a strong initial impact to create a positive first impression, leveraging the anchoring effect
- Show connections to recent trends or success stories to work with the availability heuristic
- Appropriately highlight shared values or common ground, considering in-group bias
- Explain constraints or environmental factors beforehand to counter the fundamental attribution error
One reason for my success in the previously mentioned hackathon was that I read the "underlying" needs of the judges—the essential intent behind their surface-level requirements. I inferred that the purpose of having us write test code wasn't just "to understand the importance of testing" but to address the potential underlying issue of "streamlining the test creation process."
This isn't merely about "reading between the lines." It's about thinking from the evaluator's perspective. What do hackathon organizers want to evaluate? What are the essential challenges companies face? Focusing on these questions creates differentiation.
Maximizing Impact: Value Creation Strategy
In hackathons and beyond, the most important thing to avoid is perfecting something small. I'm convinced of this from experience. Projects or ideas with minimal impact, no matter how perfectly executed, won't remain in evaluators' memories. The same principle applies to business proposals, research topics, and career choices.
What's crucial is selecting something with quantitatively significant impact. For example, in a past hackathon with the theme "make university students' lives more convenient," while many engineers created amusing applications, we took a different approach:
- Analyzed how university students spend their time
- Mapped solvable issues against their importance
- Focused on the fact that students spend tens of minutes daily choosing outfits
- Developed an app that quantitatively evaluates and optimizes clothing combinations
The key to this project was quantitatively understanding an everyday problem and translating it into a solution with numerically demonstrable results. Initially, even simple regression analysis is sufficient for the logic. What matters is creating a valuable experience.
The oft-cited principle in product development, "prioritize UX," applies equally to hackathons. Strategically deciding where to invest your limited time is itself part of your UX strategy.
The essential perspective here is: "Even with rough implementation, will users want it?" The decisive factor in evaluation isn't perfect implementation but whether your solution provides value by addressing the fundamental problem.
Behavioral economics teaches us that people feel losses more strongly than gains—a tendency known as loss aversion2. This means that "eliminating current pain or waste" creates a stronger impact than "providing new convenient features." Our "outfit optimization" solution focused precisely on the loss of "wasted time."
This principle can be applied to marketing, product development, and operational improvement proposals. For instance, highlighting "wasted work time that can be reduced by this feature" is more persuasive than promoting the addition of new functionality. Demonstrating quantitative loss reduction effects is even more compelling.
Resource Optimization and UX Power: Strategic Utilization of Limited Assets
Not just in hackathons but in business and daily life, resources like time, attention, and energy are always limited. Strategic allocation of these limited resources is essential to creating maximum impact.
For example, if you just want something that demonstrates functionality, creating a prototype in Figma is the quickest approach. In fact, many startups focus on creating prototypes using tools like Figma rather than spending time on implementation when pitching to investors, prioritizing the communication of their idea's value.
Why are prototypes and UX so important? There's a cognitive psychological explanation. Human cognitive resources have limitations, and overly complex interfaces increase cognitive load, hindering understanding3. Simple, intuitive UX helps others quickly grasp the value of your proposal. This is a crucial principle in all information communication, including business materials, academic papers, and presentations.
Furthermore, according to the Peak-End Rule, the evaluation of an experience isn't based on the overall average but on the moment when emotions peaked and how it ended4. Excellent UX can create a moment of "wow!" (the peak) and lead to a smooth conclusion (the end).
This rule can be applied to presentation design, meeting facilitation, and customer experience design. For instance, even in long meetings, consciously designing memorable moments and positive conclusions can significantly improve overall evaluation.
Another reason to allocate time to UX relates to "pricing strategy." Products that can only be sold through cost-based pricing have poor UX. A product's value is determined not by its cost but by the value users perceive. Superior UI and UX lead users to recognize higher value, ultimately contributing to business model advantages.
Ownership and Agency: Your Unique Value
In hackathons, work, research, hobbies, and all activities, what makes a significant difference is the presence or absence of ownership. "Nothing is as uninteresting as presentations or projects without ownership"—this is something I've felt across various contexts. This applies not just to temporary events but also to career development and life planning.
Why are you tackling this problem? What's behind your approach? When these are clear, your presentation becomes more persuasive. From a behavioral science perspective, this is a matter of intrinsic motivation5. When there's interest in the problem itself or personal meaning beyond external rewards (winning, promotion, salary), more creative and higher-quality results emerge. This affects learning outcomes, work performance, and long-term commitment.
The same applies when tackling hackathon or corporate challenges. 80% subjective perspective, with just enough evidence to connect to the company's management challenges is sufficient. Objective analysis alone is inadequate; personal perspective and passion are essential.
When working on projects, we often spend considerable time on objective research and analysis. However, this can dilute subjective feelings and strengths. While researching corporate management challenges is good, combining them with "your strengths" creates unique value.
This relates to the psychological effect known as the IKEA Effect. People tend to place higher value on things they've partially created themselves6. Projects leveraging your strengths and experiences naturally generate attachment and responsibility, which resonates with evaluators.
I want to emphasize the importance of the question: "Why are you the one tackling this?" What perspective or value can you, and no one else, provide? Clarifying this transforms a project from mere problem-solving into an opportunity for your growth and self-expression.
Thinking Beyond Expectations: Responding to Latent Needs
Exceeding expectations is a vital principle in hackathons and beyond. The difference between someone who delivers exactly what's asked and someone who does ten times more is immeasurable. This principle creates decisive differences in workplace performance, customer satisfaction, and relationships.
However, what's important isn't simply "doing many things." The essence is anticipating what's implicitly wanted beyond the explicit request, and acting accordingly. This perspective is crucial in understanding customer needs, relationships with supervisors, and partnerships.
In the test code auto-generation example, the surface requirement was "write test code," but behind it lay latent needs like "streamlining the test code writing process" or "improving test quality." Recognizing and providing a higher-level solution was what earned recognition. Similarly, in client work, discovering the real challenges behind surface requests and in team projects, understanding unstated organizational goals leads to differentiation.
From a behavioral economics perspective, this is a matter of expectations and reference points7. The evaluator's expectation (meeting requirements) becomes the reference point, and performance exceeding this is recognized as a gain. Particularly, addressing latent needs beyond surface requirements is likely to be recognized as a significant gain. This principle applies to promotion evaluations, customer reviews, and project assessments.
However, there's a risk that "if your prediction is wrong, the damage can be substantial." Misreading expectations might be perceived as a "loss" where even basic requirements aren't met. Due to the "loss aversion" tendency, this negative evaluation is remembered more strongly than positive ones.
How to manage this risk? From my experience, while conservative, it's important to ensure basic requirements are met and then add addressing latent needs as a "plus alpha." Rushing ahead while neglecting basic requirements leads to failure, but going one step further after securing the basics minimizes risk while exceeding expectations.
However, an important point is that hackathons are an exception to this rule.
Practicing Growth Mindset: Learning from Failure
Hackathons are special environments unlike regular work. Hackathons aren't jobs, and opportunities to fail safely in life are actually quite limited, which gives them special value. However, this concept of a "safe space to fail" can be consciously created in various contexts such as side projects, learning environments, and prototyping.
An important distinction here is between "aggressive failure" and "defensive failure." Aggressive failure occurs when you try new ideas or methods and the results don't meet expectations. Defensive failure happens when you avoid risks, make safe choices, and end up gaining nothing. This distinction can be applied to career choices, investment decisions, and research directions.
Aggressive failure is a valuable experience. This aligns with psychologist Carol Dweck's concept of growth mindset8. People with a growth mindset believe abilities can be developed through effort and experience, embrace challenges, and learn from failures. In contrast, those with a fixed mindset view abilities as static and avoid challenges to prevent failure.
This mindset has revolutionary implications for education, talent development, and self-improvement. Both as individuals and team leaders, adopting this perspective reduces fear of failure and encourages bolder challenges.
Hackathons and similar "safe-to-fail environments" are ideal for practicing the growth mindset. If you fail, it's a valuable experience; if you succeed, it builds confidence and creates a positive cycle. These are ideal conditions for promoting learning and growth.
In my own case, by taking the "aggressive" approach of test code automation, I believed I would learn about "the challenges of test automation" even if I failed. Succeeding reinforced the value of exceeding expectations and the importance of reading latent needs.
Finally, it's important to remember that whether you won or not, nobody remembers after the award ceremony. What truly matters is what you learned and experienced in the process. The essential purpose of hackathons isn't winning but the opportunity for self-growth by addressing your own challenges.
Conclusion: Universal Principles of Value Creation
The concepts discussed here originated from the specific context of hackathons, but their applications are far broader. These are universal principles that apply to business, academic research, creative activities, and relationships—any situation involving value creation.
Summarizing these principles I've extracted from my experiences for application in various contexts:
- Understand evaluator psychology → Business negotiations, interviews, proposal writing, presentations
- Focus on high-impact challenges → Business strategy, research topic selection, time management, career choices
- Pay attention to UX and cognitive load → Information design, teaching methods, communication, product development
- Value ownership and subjective worth → Team leadership, entrepreneurship, creative activities, life purpose design
- Exceed expectations by addressing latent needs → Building customer relationships, improving workplace evaluations, service design
- Embrace a growth mindset that learns from aggressive failures → Learning methods, talent development, innovation culture, self-growth
To everyone participating in the KOSEN Intercollegiate Challenge, I hope you'll keep these perspectives in mind.
Above all, maximize this experience as an opportunity for your own growth. The constraints are set by others' evaluation, but the objective function should be maximizing what remains with you. The objective function is not winning. Keep this in mind as you take on the challenge.
Finally, I'd like to leave you with this thought: "The moment you outsource your thinking to others for convenience, what you gain diminishes." Remember this, think for yourself, challenge yourself, and grow. That's the true way to win, not just in hackathons, but in life.
References
Footnotes
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Masahiro Fujita, "The Science of Cognitive Biases for Leaders: Is Your Decision-Making Really Okay?" (Gijutsu-Hyoron Co., 2023) ↩
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Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow" (Hayakawa Publishing, 2014) Thinking, Fast and Slow - Amazon ↩
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"6 Ways to Reduce Cognitive Load for Better UI Design" Adobe Blog ↩
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"What is the Peak-End Rule" Matsuoka Juku UX Psychology Glossary ↩
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"What is Intrinsic Motivation and How Does it Work?" Asana ↩
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"IKEA Effect" UX DAYS TOKYO ↩
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"What is Prospect Theory? An Easy Explanation! Practical Examples, Loss Aversion Psychology, and Framing Effects" Cbase ↩
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"Growth Mindset and Fixed Mindset" note by Lucas ↩
