Factors influencing post-hackathon project continuation in an African corporate setting
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.23962/ajic.i31.15564Keywords:
corporate hackathons, hackathon projects, project continuation, project discontinuation, financing, skills, project integrationAbstract
This article reports on a study examining the factors influencing post-hackathon project continuation in a company with presence in several African countries. The research was conducted as a case study, and focused on hackathon events held by the company between 2018 and 2020. The study identified three core factors that influenced the potential for project continuation after the corporate hackathons: (1) availability of financing; (2) team skills fit and diversity; and (3) degree of project integration into company operations. Where one or more of these elements was insufficiently present, then project continuation became less likely—and the likelihood of project discontinuation increased. The findings are of potential utility to corporate hackathon organisers seeking to increase the levels of project continuation—and, by, extension, return on investment—from their companies’ hackathon projects.
References
Afuah, A. (2020). Innovation management: Strategies, implementation, and profits (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
Briscoe, G., & Mulligan, C. (2014). Digital innovation: The hackathon phenomenon. Information, Communication & Society, 17(3), 329–347.
Cobham, D., Gowen, C., Jacques, K., Laurel, J., & Ringham, S. (2017). From appfest to entrepreneurs: Using a hackathon event to seed a university student-led enterprise. In INTED2017 Proceedings (pp. 522–529). https://doi.org/10.21125/inted.2017.0265
Drucker, P. F. (2002). The discipline of innovation. Harvard Business Review, 80(8), 95–102.
Falk, J., Kannabiran, G., & Hansen, N. B. (2021). What do hackathons do? Understanding participation in hackathons through program theory analysis. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1–16). https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445198
Flores, M., Golob, M., Maklin, D., Herrera, M., Tucci, C., Al-Ashaab, A., Williams, L., Encinas, A., Martinez, V., Zaki, M., Sosa, M., & Pineda, K. (2018). How can hackathons accelerate corporate innovation? Paper presented at IFIP WG 5.7 International Conference, APMS, Seoul. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99704-9_21
Flus, M., & Hurst, A. (2021). Design at hackathons: New opportunities for design research. Design Science, 7, E4, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1017/dsj.2021.1
Herbsleb, J., Pe Than, E. P. P., Nolte, A., Filippova, A., Bird, C., & Scallen, S. (2018). Designing corporate hackathons with a purpose. IEEE Software, 36, 15–22. https://doi.org/10.1109/MS.2018.290110547
Kienzler, H. (2016). Learning through inquiry: A global health hackathon. Teaching in Higher Education, 22(4), 455–471. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2016.1221805
Kitsios, F., & Kamariotou, M. (2019). Beyond open data hackathons: Exploring digital innovation success. Information, 10(7), 235, 2–10. https://doi.org/10.3390/info10070235
Kohne, A., & Wehmeier, V. (2020). Hackathons: From idea to successful implementation (1st ed.). Springer International. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58839-7_1
Komssi, M., Pichlis, D., Raatikainen, M., Kindström, K., & Järvinen, J. (2015). What are hackathons for? IEEE Software, 32, 60–67. https://doi.org/10.1109/MS.2014.78
Leclair, P. (2015). Hackathons: A jump start for innovation. Public Manager, 44(1), 12–15.
Leemet, A., Milani, F., & Nolte, A. (2021). Utilizing hackathons to foster sustainable product innovation – the case of a corporate hackathon series. In 2021 IEEE/ACM 13th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE) (pp. 51–60). https://doi.org/10.1109/CHASE52884.2021.00014
Lifshitz-Assaf, H., Eden, L., & Gukov, I. (2021). The experience of organizing global hackathons: From the perspective of innovation intermediaries. Journal of Business Venturing Insights, 15, e00254.
Mantzavinou, A., Ranger, B., Gudapakkam, S., Hutchins, K., Bailey, E., & Olson, K. (2018). Health hackathons drive affordable medical technology innovation through community engagement. In S. Hostettler, S. Najih Besson & J. C. Bolay (Eds.), Technologies for development (pp. 87–95). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91068-0_8
Medina, M., & Nolte, A. (2020). What do we know about hackathon outcomes and how to support them? – A systematic literature review. In Collaboration technologies and social computing: 26th International Conference, CollabTech 2020, Tartu, Estonia, September 8–11, 2020, proceedings (pp. 50–64). Springer.
Nolte, A., Chounta, I.-A., & Herbsleb, J. D. (2020). What happens to all these hackathon projects? Identifying factors to promote hackathon project continuation. In Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 4(CSCW2), 145, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1145/3415216
Nolte, A., Pe Than, E. P. P., Filippova, A., Bird, C., Scallen, S., & Herbsleb, J. (2018). You hacked and now what? – Exploring outcomes of a corporate hackathon. In Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 2(CSCW) (pp. 1–23). https://doi.org/10.1145/3274398
Pe Than, E. P. P., Nolte, A., Filippova, A., Bird, C., Scallen, S., & Herbsleb, J. (2020). Corporate hackathons, how and why? A multiple case study of motivation, projects proposal and selection, goal setting, coordination, and outcomes. Human–Computer Interaction, 35(3), 193–235. https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2020.1760869
Raatikainen, M., Komssi, M., Bianco, V., Kindström, K., & Järvinen, J. (2013). Industrial experiences of organizing a hackathon to assess a device-centric cloud ecosystem. In 2013 IEEE 37th Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC 2013) (pp. 790–799). https://doi.org/10.1109/COMPSAC.2013.130
Soltani, P., Pessi, K., Ahlin, K., & Wernered, I. (2014). Hackathon – a method for digital innovative success: A comparative descriptive study. In Proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Information Management and Evaluation (ECIME 2014) (pp. 367–373).
Stoltzfus, A., Rosenberg, M., Lapp, H., Budd, A., Cranston, K., Pontelli, E., Oliver, S., & Vos, R. A. (2017). Community and code: Nine lessons from nine NESCent hackathons. F1000Research, 6, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.11429.1
Tang, T., & Vezzani, V. (2017). Fostering a culture of collaboration through playful design jams. In DIS ’17 companion: Companion publication of the 2017 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, Funchal, Madeira Island, Portugal. https://doi.org/10.1145/3064857.3079153
Trainer, E., Kalyanasundaram, A., Chaihirunkarn, C., & Herbsleb, J. (2016). How to hackathon: Socio-technical tradeoffs in brief, intensive collocation. Paper presented at CSCW ’16: Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, San Francisco. https://doi.org/10.1145/2818048.2819946
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Zanele Ratsoga, Mpho Primus
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
How to Cite
- Abstract 225
- PDF 109