We created Project Deep Blue in May 2015 to share our passion for using technology to bring together people from the public, private and third sectors to solve social challenges. For most people, technology isn’t a source of entertainment—it’s a way to solve immediate problems in their everyday lives.

Every year, our community volunteers their time over three months to mentor engineering students as they prototype and build solutions to real-world problems. But we don’t just focus on technical skills. The students attend workshops and brainstorming sessions to refine the problem statement and learn about agile methodologies and UX design. The teams then complete a working solution to qualify to participate in the semifinal, where they present their project to a technical jury. The finalists discuss their designs with a panel of academics and industry experts.

Today, Project Deep Blue is scaling from its India base to be held across all our locations globally. We’ve been on this journey for six years now but, as the role of hackathons changes, we will continue to evolve Project Deep Blue to optimize it for iterating ideas, taking solutions to scale and helping employees and students to have a greater impact in their communities.