The innovation-driven hackathon: one means for accelerating innovation

Established companies often have difficulties developing new innovative products in a fast and creative way because of their fix structure and organizational complexity. With decision processes divided across several departments it takes too long to get all required skills and people onboard compared to more agile competitors. There are plenty of causes for organizational obstacles which hinder and slow-down the companies developing innovative products, particularly, within large companies having established processes and a lot of bureaucracy. From the perspective of the authors a set of means is required to tackle these organizational challenges as well to develop an innovation-friendly underlying corporate culture to enable the company identifying, developing, and selling innovative solutions in time. This paper introduces the concept of hackathons and describes how companies may consider hackathons as one means for overcoming organizational challenges and speeding-up the early phases of their innovation process up to the development and evaluation of prototypes. Although a hackathon can be applied for a variety of purposes, this paper focusses on its benefits for identifying, and developing innovative solutions and overcoming organizational hurdles on the path. Therefore, the Innovation-driven hackathon pattern is introduced and described in this paper from the perspective of practitioners.

The authors aim at sharing practical experience with other industry experts as well as researchers and getting new insights concerning the application of hackathons and other means for optimizing the innovation process in the industry context.