A “multi-basket” student shopping app, able to help students pool their shopping orders, came out top in a competition run by Tesco to search for ideas for the future.
The retailer’s tech arm Tesco Labs ran a ‘Hackathon’ event, which pitted ideas from 16 teams of budding inventors against each other.
In total, 70 people took part in the event at Tesco’s Welwyn Garden City campus. They included a mix of office and store colleagues and guests from companies such as IBM, O2, Oracle and Bartle Bogle Hegarty.
Each team had three minutes to pitch and demonstrate their idea to Tesco’s panel of judges: chief technology officer Edmond Mesrobian, technology directory Mike Yorwerth, chief customer officer Alessandra Bellini and BBC Click journalist Kate Russell.
The winning idea was built by a team on Tesco’s graduate scheme and featured the app to make it easier to shop as a student household.
“The Hackathon is a brilliant source of inspiration for us - we always end up with a selection of new ideas and new ways of solving existing problems that help serve our customers better,” said head of Tesco Labs Angela Maurer.
“The ideas this year were no exception - we had solutions ranging from new ways to search our product catalogue to ‘magic smart lists’ and Alexa skills all designed to help our customers shop,”
A Tesco spokeswoman added: “The event gives participants the opportunity to bring their ideas to life. However, we have no immediate plans to take these forward.”
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