Insider Inc. held its second-ever hackathon - these are some of the top ideas our tech teams came up with

If you were given one week to build something new or innovative that would benefit people or your company, what would you create?

Here at Business Insider, our tech team was given that opportunity in our first-ever hack week in December 2016 - and it was such a success that we recently held "Hack Week 2: The Unhackening."

As a way to kick off our hacking, we hold a team meeting to pitch ideas, review some suggestions for projects, and form teams. All participants are then given four days - Monday through Thursday - to work on their passion project, concluding with presentations on Friday.

Each participant/team is able to use technologies they prefer, which really allows for creativity and gives everyone a chance to stretch their legs and work on something cool they may not have had time for otherwise.

Our first hack week, held last December, was a fun experiment that culminated in the whole team gathering in our building's auxiliary cafe for presentations. There was great energy in the room as the team shared their creations - like a lunch-ordering plugin for Slack, sentiment analysis of our story content, and even an interactive, customizable corn-hole game (an office favorite here.)

One of the award winning ideas, a webhook that shows editors who else is currently editing the same post, was released into production as a quick follow.

"Hack Week 2: The Unhackening" resulted in another batch of improvements, creative solutions and candidates for production-ready products. As is our (albeit new) tradition, voting was held for a variety of award titles. We spoke with a few of the winners to get a better look into their own processes and projects.