Digital Innovation Hackathon: GSB Students Reimagine Urban Mobility with Yango
Seventeen teams spent four intense days in October rethinking how people move, deliver, and connect in cities. The brief from Yango—a global tech company behind ride-hailing and on-demand services across Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and the CIS—was deliberately strict: build solutions that are smarter, safer, and more engaging, ready to launch in 3–6 months in markets like the UAE, Angola, Peru, Pakistan, or Kazakhstan—without leaning on coupons or heavy data.
From Thursday’s kickoff, classrooms and co-working spaces at GSB turned into buzzing studios: brainstorming, country research, route maps, field notes, and the first hand-drawn screens. By Saturday, the cadence was set—one-minute pitches, brisk mentor feedback, then one-minute demos. Whiteboards filled with sketches, numbers, and scenarios. Every team ran at least one tiny test (often a tabletop role-play) and changed something based on what they learned. In rooms built for lectures, the weekend became a product workshop. Many teams stayed late into Saturday night and polished through Sunday morning to submit their 12-slide deck and 90-second demo.
The ideas took on real problems: safer rides for women in Pakistan and Latin America; trip-long, privacy-aware video recording; insuring every ride via local partners; and simplified, safer modes for schoolchildren and elderly users. Others went beyond rides: Yango Food for Business; Yango Experts (a lightweight marketplace for repairs and freelance help); community routes and marshrutkas done right for Bolivia; better inter-city handoffs where public transport is thin; gamified engagement with tokens; and even a light social layer—Yango Companion—“between Tinder and Snapchat.”
On Monday, the Top-6 finalists presented live. First place went to Team NiP (composed of 3rd-year students) with a fresh take on pooled rides: community-suggested shared routes that start from managed pickup points and run on schedule once enough riders join. “We wanted a profitable, scalable niche with low implementation cost,” said Nikita Kremlev. Vladislav Inozemtsev added, “The hardest part was operational detail—how to create and filter routes and pickup points.” Raj Aryan credited teamwork: “Everyone brought a different skill; we built on each other’s ideas until it clicked.”
Second place went to Team Hackathon (composed of 4th-year students) for turning a taxi into an exploration guide—a feature for travelers with limited time. “The idea came from a real 10-hour layover in Morocco,” said Ivan Guliy. “Plan a route inside the Yango app and ride from spot to spot—we’d pilot in Dubai first.” David Shlykov noted the challenge: “We had many ideas. The work was choosing what serves the team—and the user—best.” Yango provided awards for the top three teams.
We didn’t solve everything in four days—and that’s fine. For Yango, hackathons like this are a development wind tunnel: an opportunity to quickly test and validate a number of growth-oriented ideas using bright minds who aren’t burdened by industry standards and legacy systems, and to see which of these ideas keep flying after all the “what ifs.” For students enrolled in our Digital Product Management bachelor program, it was product boot camp, in which they had to define a pain, pick one user, draw the flow, write the promise, set safety rules, test once, tighten the story—all in four days, alongside equally ambitious peers.
organizer and GSB faculty
This was a great event. Students solved real problems for a major international company (Yango is an ecosystem with 100M+ users in 20+ countries and ~$15B revenue in 2024), worked with the experts who build these services, led teams under pressure, and learned to move in several dimensions at once. It’s the best way to polish what they’ve learned—and to make AI tools truly useful.
