Hero CoLabs - A Platform To Collaborate With Talent from every stream

Who hasn’t heard of Hero MotoCorp? India’s leading two-wheeler company, Hero has consistently worked to make India more mobile. And it has done so by working on its mission to create, collaborate, and inspire with each new product and/or service offering. 

To bring to life its vision, Hero MotoCorp partnered with Unstop to conceptualize a platform where talent comes together to collaborate. The aim was to allow for collaboration and ideation for talent irrespective of their functional stream. Hero MotoCorp understood that to build for India, you needed designers, engineers, artists and more. The HeroCoLabs Challenge, over the past few years has successfully given 39,871 innovators a platform to express, explore, collaborate and grow. 

In this case study, we’ll see how Hero MotoCorp was able to make the leap from a highly recognized brand to a highly engaged brand - building a relationship with its target audience and increasing its penetration in the non-engineering community by inviting talented individuals from diverse backgrounds to not just compete, but collaborate and bring their vision to life, literally. 

The Ask

When Hero decided to revamp the way it connected with the community, it wasn’t looking to craft a competition, alone. Rather, it was looking to build a crowdsourcing platform - one that would encourage genuine and meaningful engagements among creative minds, helping bring their vision to reality. And who were these creative minds? Designers, architects, gamers… all Hero’s customers. 

Yes, Hero envisioned a platform where customers could collaborate with Hero, and design for customers.  

But a single platform to get everyone together? Having already built a strong connect with the engineering and management student communities through Hero Campus Challenges (via Unstop), Hero knew Unstop could execute its vision of a collaborative, engaging platform - one where everyone, from design students to aspiring coders, could come together and design for Hero. 

Hero Campus Connect is an annual Campus hiring challenge conducted by Hero for undergraduate and postgraduate students in engineering and MBA. Participants get a peek into the life at Hero by solving real-life business challenges for Hero. Know more about the challenges here. 

The Solution

Few challenges hold the ability to engage students and professionals from all corners - from engineering to design. Unstop’s 5.6 Mn+ community was the only answer. 

Thus, Hero and Unstop collaborated for Hero CoLabs - a platform to host multiple design challenges open to everyone, from working professionals to young students to college grads and more. And the reward? A chance for winners to see their designs go from table to store. 

Here’s how the Hero CoLabs design challenge works: 

1. The Problem Statement: Hero shares the details of the bike/scooty model, app, game, showroom, or merchandise to be designed, along with its specifications with the participants. 
2. Submissions: Participants then submit their designs in the specified format. For example, for Hero CoLabs Design 5.0, participants had to submit 3 high-resolution, black views of the model (HF Deluxe). But for the Hero eXPerience challenge, participants shared a 3D Render of their proposed solution and a video (less than 4 minutes long) describing their idea.
3. Evaluation: The designs go through a two-tier evaluation process - 
   

• Voting on the top entries. For every challenge, the designs are open for voting to the general public. An individual can vote for a minimum of three and a maximum of five ideas. 
• Evaluation of the top entries by the internal Hero MotoCorp Jury
• Winners will be decided based on voting & Hero MotoCorp Jury's decision
• Winners have a chance to win multiple gifts. Additionally,  if a design is really inspired, Hero may actually use the design on its upcoming model and/or merchandise, depending on the competition.

Hero CoLabs first started in 2020. At the time, Hero introduced two challenges - 

1. design graphics for its bike model, Splendor+, and 
2. design for a t-shirt or a riding jacket inspired by XPulse. 

Since then, several challenges have been hosted on the platform. The flagship design challenge remains designing graphics for a bike model. 

The Outcome

Hero and Unstop have been collaborating successfully for five years, and counting. Through Unstop, Hero has conducted its flagship campus hiring challenge and brought Hero CoLabs to life. 

Let’s take a look at how Hero CoLabs has evolved since its inception, and the kind of response it has garnered over the past three years: 

• In its first year itself, Hero CoLabs reached 2.17 lakh individuals and received 10k+ registrations.  The success of the maiden edition was all the proof Hero needed to expand. Recharged, the Hero team, with Unstop, set out to launch and execute a series of Hero CoLab challenges - with plans to go global. 
• Just a year after its launch, in 2021 Hero CoLabs went global. Along with India, participants from Peru and Columbia were eligible to participate in the challenges under Hero CoLabs. 
• In the last three years, Hero has conducted 5 editions of the Hero CoLabs Design challenge for bike and scooty designs and three Here CoLabs challenges for game development, app development and showroom design. These are: 
  • HeroColabs App Challenge: Participants had to propose a new UX/UI theme for the Hero Customer Application along with any 3 functionality screens (2 from the existing functionalities and 1 from new proposed). 
  • HeroCoLabs eXPerience Challenge: Participants had to design a Next-Gen Premium showroom for Hero Motocorp. 
  • HeroCoLabs Xdrags Game Development Challenge: Participants had to develop a Motorbike Drag Racing Game.
• In the last three years, Unstop has collectively recorded 39k+ registrations across all nine Hero CoLab challenges. 

• Unstop helped Hero conduct the diverse challenges, go global and attract a varied group of participants, allowing Hero to save time and resources, and yet increase its brand awareness and audience connect.

The collaboration between Hero and Unstop is a testament to how changing hiring strategies and competition structures can improve recruitment and engagement between organizations and their audience. 

If you too are looking for ways to improve your hiring strategy, reach out coffee@unstop.com.