Corporate hackathons can inspire teams and promote creativity if properly run. To be successful, a hackathon needs clear objectives, participation rules, deliverables, and assessment criteria. It should generate novel ideas and prototypes, with the goal of boosting innovation culture. Success is defined by participation rates, number of actionable ideas, and impact on team dynamics and morale. The event involves a preparation phase, intensive work period, and assessment of deliverables. Winners receive awards like bonuses or resources to further develop ideas. Overall, hackathons can drive cultural shifts and produce strategic product concepts.

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George Krasadakis
Product Architect | Tech Inventor | Entrepreneur. Writing on Innovation and Product
Development; Views, ideas and opinions are my own.
Dec 31, 2016 · 7 min read
How to run a successful corporate
hackathon
Corporate hackathons provide a great way to inspire
your team.They can also promote creativity,
collaboration, and innovative thinking!
If run properly, a series of hackathons can establish a stream of
valuable ideas. It can also have a signi cant cultural e ect within your
team, potentially awakening a experimentation and innovation
mindset
This article will explain di erent types of hackathons. It will discuss
objectives, success criteria, and other important considerations.
According to Wikipedia, a hackathon is de ned as “ … a design sprint-
like event in which computer programmers and others involved in software
development, including graphic designers, interface designers, project
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managers, and others, often including subject-matter-experts, collaborate
intensively on software projects.”
In practice it is frequently used to describe any idea-generation
initiative with or without functional software deliverable.
My own de nition would be:
An intensive, software-centric ideation, prototyping
and presentation challenge on known or unknown
problems or opportunities
Intensive in the above de nition implies a time-boxed process asking
participants for the ‘impossible’—to come up with novel solutions to
particular problems or innovative ideas and prototypes regarding new
business opportunities.
Hackathons are technology-driven and primarily about software—
hence the software-centric element in the de nition. A Hackathon is
very demanding on participants—it requires not only great technical
and coding skills but also ideation and presentation skills.
Participants are asked to come up with great ideas, formulate a
prototype and prioritize wisely; then self-organize and execute—do
quick research, prepare resources, write code, reuse existing
components and systems and nally prepare a presentation—all in
time-boxed scenario. The Hackathon may be focusing on known
problems or business opportunities or technologies (stated upfront) or
it could be open to any ideas with no particular constraints.
Check also:
De ning your Hackathon
2018: Innovation—Trends and Opportunities
What’s next on AI, AR, VR, NUI, Robotics, Data &
Visualization, Blockchain
medium.com

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Having a clear de nition of your hackathon event (style, processes,
objectives, awards) is key for its success. The major attributes de ning
your hackathon are:
Date, duration, lead time and venues. Especially the lead-time is
important in order to allow participants to get prepared by
discussing ideas, teams and collaboration scenarios. Depending on
the case and the size of the corporation/ involved team, there
should be a lead time of a few weeks.
Participation rules: the logic de ning who is eligible to
participate (for instance full-time employees from particular
teams, venues etc.)
Minimum Deliverable: the type of deliverable required for a
successful submission—for example is it a functional prototype +
source code? a predictive model? a pitch video? this is key
information which can have signi cant impact on the
participation rates
Context: the focus of the event in terms of technologies, particular
business problems to be solved. For instance it could be a Data
hackathon or Robotics or AR/VR; or any technology, while focusing
on a particular class of problems.
Scope: is it an internal, company-wide or public event? A private
hackathon could target particular teams, or the entire corporation.
A public hackathon accepts participants outside the corporation.
Assessment criteria and process: the rules, priorities and
processes in order to evaluate submissions (is there a voting
process, a panel of experts? what are the dimensions to use when
evaluating an idea?)
Award: number of winners and type of award
Blog: The Innovation Machine
Setting the objectives, de ning‘Success’
Typically, a Hackathon event is expected to deliver at least a set of
interesting, novel ideas. Ideally, there should be a few outstanding
concepts, possibly with a prototype and quick proof of the
concept/technology involved.
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Beyond the obvious objective—to generate high-value actionable
business ideas and product concepts— there is another aspect related
to the team dynamics and the innovation mentality: a great
hackathon should boost the innovation culture and further establish
the idea-sharing, e ective collaboration and creativeness driven by
enthusiasm towards a shared goal.
Employees have a great opportunity to discover technologies, teams
and demonstrate their skills and talents outside their typical job
description; Corporations have the opportunity to identify talent,
experience powerful teams being setup and capture valuable feedback.
How is success de ned?
Success criteria depend on the particular context—business, industry,
size of the corporation, timing etc. In all cases though KPIs can be
de ned on some or all of the following:
Participation rate: this is an obvious indicator of one aspect of the
success of the event—how employees responded to the ‘call to
innovate’. The percentage over the total number of employees
depends of course on the nature of the hackathon, the timing, the
focus etc. The target should be set after analyzing similar events
within the same corporation.
Volume of Ideas: the volume of ideas generated is also
signi cant, especially when analyzed against additional metadata
(check also: principles of a great ideation platform)
Percentage of Actionable Ideas: the percentage of actionable
ideas (those who are promising or worth further investment from
a business point of view) is a good indicator of success.
Percentage of Business opportunities: those promising ideas
which—after post-processing—proved to be valuable business
opportunities worth of further investment.
Percentage of IP-generating projects: those projects who are
eligible and valuable for patent protection.
Conversion rates: the whole batch of ideas/concepts/projects
generated should be monitored as a ‘cohort’ against time. This way
ideas originated from a particular hackathon event but delivering
value only after a period of time, will be also measured as
successful outcome.
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Opportunities for publicity: measures of ‘media attention’ as the
result of the hackathon event
Team impact: as captured from formal feedback processes—a
great source of insights is the opinions of the participants and
stakeholders. This could allow quantitative and qualitative
analysis form many di erent angles including the e ect on team
dynamics and morale.
Running the Hackathon
Hackathons typically have a lead time—a preparation phase, from the
announcement of the event to the actual ‘hack-time’, as explained
below:
The ‘design time’
This is about communicating the event to the employees, attracting
attention and enabling formal registration of interest.
As soon as the Hackathon is announced, employees should have a
su cient lead time—typically a few weeks- to explore ideas,
technologies, teams and resources. This is an informal preparation
phase which should be supported by proper tools (systems to enable
employees to structure their ideas, projects, teams; communicate their
e ort, ask for advice or help). In all cases you should:
Announce the hackathon with clear messages and strong
sponsorship from the leadership
Frequently and consistently communicate updates on the
timeline of the event, the number of participants, the availability
of the resources
Provide self-service tools for employees to register, create
projects, explore projects, form teams, explore technologies etc.
Assign a small team to support the process
The ‘run time’
This is where the magic happens—teams working intensively to align
their ideas, de ne the ‘product’, execute, review, iterate; the most
exciting and creative part of the hackathon where employees
forget their formal roles and titles and self-organize focusing on
their mission: to create something novel and impactful. Depending
on the de nition of each event, there might be a video pitch
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requirement, a live pitching of the idea or a live demo of the product/
prototype. In all cases the importance of e ectively presenting the work
done is critical. You should also:
Make sure that participants have dedicated time to work on their
projects
Ensure that suitable physical space and equipment is available to
all teams
The ‘assessment time’
Valid deliverables submitted by the teams are being assessed based on
the protocol of the particular event. This could involve a voting process
across the corporation, a panel of experts analyzing certain aspects of
each project, or a combination of both. In certain cases, actual
customers could also be involved and provide feedback to projects. Be
mindful of the following:
Selecting winners based on popularity within the corporation is
typically biased and probably misleading
The panel of experts should use prede ned dimensions like, for
example, feasibility, level of innovation, expected business impact,
opportunity for intellectual property, and potential for
di erentiation.
Winners & Awards
Depending on the structure of the particular event, there could a be a
single winning team or multiple winners can be named across di erent
categories. Selecting the award for each case is also a very signi cant
aspect of the Hackathon—typically awards are monetary (for example
a bonus), symbolic (plaques, cubes, title), or a piece of
technology/device.
The most important though from a developer’s point of view is
resources and sponsorship to drive the product/idea to the next
stage. This could be the most inspiring award of all—the ability for the
winning team to use specialized resources (developers, equipment,
software, services)—according to a suitable plan—and get prepared for a
formal presentation of the outcome to the senior stakeholders, leaders and
decision makers. This type of award can drive impressive success stories of
‘hackathon projects moving to production’ and attach additional purpose
to the event.
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7. 2/24/2018 How to run a successful corporate hackathon – freeCodeCamp
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The business value
Hackathons are expected to generate actionable ideas (for example
features for an existing product), strategic product concepts (a new
product to consider and further experiment with) and process
improvements (novel, more e cient ways to do things).
At the team level, Hackathons provide a great way to inspire teams and
promote creativity, collaboration and innovative thinking. Programmed
in the right way, hackathons can drive an important cultural shift
within the team: the experimentation & innovation mindset.
A gami cation layer on top of hackathons can further motivate and
reward employees for being innovative while staying aligned with the
strategy of the corporation.
. . .
Interested in Arti cial Intelligence?
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Interested in novel ideas and thoughts on innovation? Follow The
Innovation Machine
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