How Can Hackathons Accelerate Corporate Innovation?

Abstract

In recent years, the way corporates innovate has changed significantly. Going from 'behind closed doors' innovation to open innovation where collaboration with outsiders is encouraged, companies are in the pursuit of more effective ways to accelerate their innovation outcomes. As a result, many companies are investing to create more entrepreneurial environments, which not only empower employees to proactively propose and test new ideas, but also reach beyond company walls to involve many others in the co-creation of new solutions. In this paper, we outline the most notable benefits of hackathons from the perspective of large organizations, and present the benefits and a methodology for organizing hackathons, ie. competition-based events where participants work in small teams over a short period of time to ideate, design, rapidly prototype and test their ideas with a user-centric approach to solve a determined challenge. This paper also provides a brief insight into the CEMEX Hackathon, which was organized following the aforementioned methodology.

Design at hackathons: new opportunities for design research

“…The publications varied in their motivations. A few publications aimed to propose a framework for hackathons (Johnson & Robinson 2014;Buttfield-Addison et al 2016;Flores et al 2018). They either presented a pattern of design behaviour as observed at a hackathon, or a structure to be followed at a hackathon.…”

“…Hackathons tend to be of interest to computer programmers, designers and engineers; it is typical for the theme of the event to be tech-centric. They have been used in a wide variety of contexts and for different purposes, including education, networking and to accelerate innovation (Flores et al 2018). Hackathons could be run as external events (open to anyone), or internally by organisations (Briscoe & Mulligan 2014).…”

“…At these events, participants are not instructed to use the design process; rather, it is merely provided as a tool to help the teams. Other events suggest a design process to teams, such as Design Thinking (as popularised by Brown 2008) with an additional 'pitch' phase (Flores et al 2018). When design instruction is offered to hackathon teams, there is a tendency for teams to use user-centered design practices (Page et al 2016) and more closely follow an established design process (Flores et al 2018).…”

“…Other events suggest a design process to teams, such as Design Thinking (as popularised by Brown 2008) with an additional 'pitch' phase (Flores et al 2018). When design instruction is offered to hackathon teams, there is a tendency for teams to use user-centered design practices (Page et al 2016) and more closely follow an established design process (Flores et al 2018). Further, a design-oriented structure on the event indicates an awareness of design processes on the part of hackathon organisers.…”

WIP: Building a Bridge Between Hackathons and Software Engineering Capstones Through Adaptive Expertise

“…Research on hackathons have categorized the many different types that exist such as tech and focus centric (civic oriented) (Briscoe & Mulligan, 2013) or as 24-hour, industry, or competition hackathons (Porras et al, 2018). Others have focused on hackathons in industrial settings, identifying hackathons as a new way to innovate by leveraging companies own employees instead of their research teams (Flores et al, 2018;Komssi et al, 2015). At a collegiate level, a majority of hackathon research is centered around discovering what students think of hackathons (Warner & Guo, 2017) or using hackathons as pedagogy to reinvent classroom experiences (Calco & Veeck, 2015;Gama et al, 2018).…”