Hacking Policy. Exploring Innovative Ways to Advance Policy Reform

The 2016 Startup Europe Comes to Silicon Valley (SEC2SV) 10 day-long program of activities featured a Policy Hack in partnership with Dell, to explore innovative ways to address some of today’s most pressing policy issues faced by global innovators and entrepreneurs.

The objective of the Policy Hack was to give top-line thinking from a transatlantic perspective on how policy conditions for entrepreneurs could be improved.

Teams of four to five ‘hackers’ were given one hour to brainstorm and draft solutions for five different issue areas: trade, privacy and data transfer, IPR and copyright, access to capital, and worker mobility.

Each solution was then pitched to a team of judges. Teams were asked to draft a solution that had a reasonable level of utility and featured the ability to be replicated as well as prospects of being adopted.

Today we officially issue a report that describes the Policy Hack methodology and summarizes the main outcomes of the discussion (here is the link for the free download).

While we are fully aware that the topics addressed during the hackathon are of significant complexity to be unbundled in just a few hours of work, we strongly value the process undertaken: exposing policy matters to a balanced representation of policy makers, entrepreneurs, and investors/managers. And using problem-solving processes that are closer to the world of entrepreneurs.

As such, we consider the recommendations proposed below as possible high-level suggestions, rather than properly actionable proposals.

But the methodology and approach are proven to be valuable to bridge policy makers to the world of entrepreneurs.