Speeding Up Innovation with Business Hackathons (original) (raw)
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Hack your organizational innovation: literature review and integrative model for running hackathons
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This article aims to offer a comprehensive overview of the existing literature on the hackathon phenomenon to offer scholars a common ground for future research and managers and practitioners research-based guidelines on best planning and running a hackathon. A review of the most relevant literature on hackathons was conducted to serve as the research basis for our integrative model and guidelines. This article synthesizes the research on hackathons to offer comprehensible guidelines for practitioners while also providing questions for future hackathon researchers. We differentiate between the different design characteristics of hackathons while noting their advantages and disadvantages, discuss tools and methodologies for successful hackathon setup and execution step-by-step, and provide recommendations to encourage project continuity.
The Power of Hackathons: Roadmap for Sustainable Open Innovation
Commons Lab Policy Memo Series Vol 3, 2013
Author: Zach Bastian Study Director: Lea Shanley Editor: Aaron Lovell Hackathons offer an opportunity to achieve innovation-oriented goals with limited resources, but require careful planning and organizational commitment to sustain engagement over the long term. This brief provides an overview of hackathons and offers strategies from previous successful events.
Open Innovation via Crowdsourcing: A Digital Only Hackathon Case Study from Sweden
Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity, 2021
This paper explores HacktheCrisis, the Swedish hackathon that was a response to the COVID-19 pandemic to address the challenges that it brought up. The main aims of the research were to explore the feasibility of the digital only COVID-19 hackathon as an open innovation method and to uncover the major issues that emerged during the HacktheCrisis hackathon in Sweden. The process and outcomes were assessed, leading to the lessons and development of recommendations for future health hackathons as an innovation in health care. We have found that conducting the virtual hackathon for COVID-19 resulted in significant growth in the digital health community in Sweden. Governments should be as fast as the private actors and citizens to address these challenges and to undertake organizational adaptations. Not only the hackathons, but the projects and processes after the hackathons should also be planned. Matchmaking between individuals and private and public actors should be facilitated throug...
Crowdsourcing A pandemonium for disruptive innovation
With each paradigm shift the world changes radically. People and organisations need to adapt to the new circumstances. The world as we know it is changing rapidly and is shifting from a consumer to a creator economy. In this third industrial revolution consumers do not only consume but also produce products and services tailored to their individual requirements. This is facilitated mainly through people’s access to open digital networks, in which everyone can express their wishes. Within this context organisations have difficulties finding, identifying and accepting new ideas. Crowdsourcing has proved to be a useful tool for this new era because it is goal oriented and compatible with prevailing top- down, traditional management structures. It allows companies to tap into the creative and collective mind of the masses whilst still allowing people to fulfil their participatory role. However, extensive research has uncovered that crowds and the sponsor of crowdsourcing initiatives are still not optimally aligned. The possible reasons for this are manifold. The main cause could lie in the sponsors. Crowdsourcing is mainly utilised to create promotional campaigns and new product or service development with incremental change yet disruptive outputs are rejected due to their misalignment with the prevailing order of things. Another possible reason is the programmatic way in which crowdsourcing initiatives form a small component of a linear, milestone-based change process. It is used as a tool only for sourcing ideas. No information has indicated that the crowdsourcing tool is being used for exploration of a problem, gaining insights into human behaviour, or experimentation with conceptual prototypes. Initiatives are usually one-off events. Sponsors don’t seem to engage more than once to launch reiterative challenges in order to allow for a concept to develop. Furthermore, research has shown that the tools need to be adjusted in order to render more aligned results. The necessary diversity of the crowd contributing ideas is rather low and the tools do not have mechanisms that ensure a higher degree of diversity. In addition the tools do not motivate the participants to initiate and maintain a fruitful creative interaction. This is made evident through the possibility of giving final judgments early in the interactive process and the lack of mechanisms that allow concurrent and private work streams. In order to profit from the potential that crowdsourcing has to offer, three things need to change: 1. Sponsoring organisations will need to change their attitude and become more experimental and ready to embrace risk and failure 2. The tools will need to reach a higher degree of sophistication 3. The crowdsourcing tool needs to be deployed as part of the design process. Last but not least the research has also uncovered that crowdsourcing in general is a disruptive tool in itself because it can, and does, actually replace many functions performed by established organisations. A combination of these could lead to a fully crowdsourced enterprise.
Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity
Despite the fact that hackathons and digital innovation contests have emerged as substantial intermediaries in open innovation and entrepreneurship, knowledge about how hackathons and digital innovation contests impact innovation in cities is restricted. There is also a scarcity of models that aid in the organization of digital innovation contests. Based on the existing frameworks for contest organizations, the aim of this article is to present a case study which develops a framework for hosting and evaluating open data hackathons. The hackathon framework is developed from the organizer’s viewpoint, and it has been executed in three digital innovation competitions in Thessaloniki. The suggested scheme adds new knowledge to the field of open data and digital innovation competitions while also providing practitioners with opportunities to host digital contests. Moreover, this framework offers hackathon organizers with regulations and resources to help them plan innovation contests tha...