IMPACT Industrial Hackathons: Findings from a Longitudinal Case Study on Short-Term vs Long-Term IMPACT Implementations from Industrial Hackathons Within Grundfos

In the Digital Era, more and more institutions are searching for new ways to speed up their digital innovation processes, while having new digital experiences. Hackathons are such experience-driven and intense problem-solving workshops, where people with different skillsets gather in one place (“hackathon room”) to solve a set of predefined challenges along with a prototyping practice. In the last 10 years, hackathons have emerged as a global phenomenon for accelerating digital innovations at scale. Hackathons are mostly used as collaborative prototyping instruments in open innovation hubs, maker spaces, and in startups. In the meantime, we find new hackathon formats in the public sector (civic hacks, eHealth hacks, etc.), and more and more large corporations are using hackathons, inside and outside their company borders. Nevertheless, there is a lack of knowledge on how to integrate hackathons more efficiently within large-scale corporate cultures. With this PhD thesis, we seek to tackle this gap and better understand the nature of corporate hackathons along their entire organizational life-cycle. Our research questions are focused on how are corporate hackathons used within larger corporate contexts over time? And how can we describe and measure the impacts and effects of their POST-implementations over different corporate contexts?