I don't think validation is a bottleneck, the real effort would be to get industry which employs non-tech people and skilled non-tech candidates under one roof for a hackathon like event.

Coding competitions have been there for several decades in almost every decent university across the world. Once they started to bring in employers and skilled candidates under one roof with a catchy branding like 'Hackathon, techathon etc.' it became very successful.

It's high time we do the same in non-tech space.