Innovation in Large-scale agile – Benefits and Challenges of Hackathons when Hacking from Home

06/01/2021
by   Rasmus Ulfsnes, et al.
0

Hackathons are events in which diverse teams work together to explore, and develop solutions, software or even ideas. Hackathons have been recognized not only as public events for hacking, but also as a corporate mechanism for innovation. Hackathons are a way for established companies to achieve increased employee wellbeing as well as being a curator for innovation and developing new products. Sudden transition to the work-from-home mode caused by the COVID-19 pandemic first put many corporate events requiring collocation, such as hackathons, temporarily on hold and then motivated companies to find ways to hold these events virtually. In this paper, we report our findings from investigating hackathons in the context of a large agile company by first exploring the general benefits and challenges of hackathons and then trying to understand how they were affected by the virtual setup. We conducted nine interviews, surveyed 23 employees and analyzed a hackathon demo. We found that hackathons provide both individual and organizational benefits of innovation, personal interests, and acquiring new skills and competences. Several challenges such as added stress due to stopping the regular work, employees fearing not having enough contribution to deliver and potential mismatch between individual and organizational goals were also found. With respect to the virtual setup, we found that virtual hackathons are not diminishing the innovation benefits, however, some negative effect surfaced on the social and networking side.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
12/10/2021

Improving Productivity through Corporate Hackathons: A Multiple Case Study of Two Large-scale Agile Organizations

Software development companies organize hackathons to encourage innovati...
research
08/17/2021

Using Guilds to Foster Internal Startups in Large Organizations: A case study

Software product innovation in large organizations is fundamentally chal...
research
06/24/2020

How do Agile Software Startups deal with uncertainties by Covid-19 pandemic?

The dissipation of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS...
research
02/16/2018

Innovation Initiatives in Large Software Companies: A Systematic Mapping Study

To keep the competitive advantage and adapt to changes in the market and...
research
02/10/2022

Work-from-home and its implication for project management, resilience and innovation – a global survey on software companies

[Context] The COVID-19 pandemic has had a disruptive impact on how peopl...
research
10/23/2022

The Future of Work: Agile in a Hybrid World

An agile organization adapts what they are building to match their custo...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset