Department of Management

TY - JOUR

T1 - Crisis Innovation: Leveraging Virtual Hackathons for Rapid Ideation

AU - Yokoi, Tomoko

AU - Obwegeser, Nikolaus

AU - Beretta, Michela

N1 - Publisher Copyright: IEEE

PY - 2021/8

Y1 - 2021/8

N2 - The COVID-19 crisis brought about an unprecedented wave of interest into rapid ideation and innovation. Among others, the pandemic triggered a series of collaborative innovation events-so-called hackathons-to leverage the power of the crowd for crisis response. In contrast to earlier hackathons, these events are different in their speed of mobilization, global scale, and their fully virtual nature with organizers and teams being geographically dispersed. Analyzing this new empirical phenomenon, we characterize COVID-19 hackathons against other forms of innovation crowdsourcing and describe challenges and best practices in the areas of people management, session management, technology, and knowledge management. Based on our empirical findings, we develop a conceptual framework that emphasizes the importance of managing virtual crisis hackathons as the integrated sum of its different parts. Empirical evidence is presented to demonstrate how open innovation efforts such as hackathons can be leveraged for crisis management and more generally for ideation activities in increasingly remote working environments. This article contributes to crowdsourcing research by highlighting key differences of virtual hackathons from the traditional crowdsourcing approaches and hackathons investigated by prior research. Moreover, we affirm the value of mobilizing knowledge from different sources, particularly from a broad spectrum of civil society.

AB - The COVID-19 crisis brought about an unprecedented wave of interest into rapid ideation and innovation. Among others, the pandemic triggered a series of collaborative innovation events-so-called hackathons-to leverage the power of the crowd for crisis response. In contrast to earlier hackathons, these events are different in their speed of mobilization, global scale, and their fully virtual nature with organizers and teams being geographically dispersed. Analyzing this new empirical phenomenon, we characterize COVID-19 hackathons against other forms of innovation crowdsourcing and describe challenges and best practices in the areas of people management, session management, technology, and knowledge management. Based on our empirical findings, we develop a conceptual framework that emphasizes the importance of managing virtual crisis hackathons as the integrated sum of its different parts. Empirical evidence is presented to demonstrate how open innovation efforts such as hackathons can be leveraged for crisis management and more generally for ideation activities in increasingly remote working environments. This article contributes to crowdsourcing research by highlighting key differences of virtual hackathons from the traditional crowdsourcing approaches and hackathons investigated by prior research. Moreover, we affirm the value of mobilizing knowledge from different sources, particularly from a broad spectrum of civil society.

KW - COMPETITION

KW - CONTESTS

KW - COVID-19

KW - Collaboration

KW - Crowdsourcing

KW - Interviews

KW - MANAGEMENT

KW - Pandemics

KW - STUDENTS

KW - SYSTEMS

KW - Technological innovation

KW - Tools

KW - crisis

KW - crowdsourcing

KW - hackathon

KW - ideation

KW - innovation

U2 - 10.1109/TEM.2021.3097238

DO - 10.1109/TEM.2021.3097238

M3 - Journal article

SP - 1

EP - 13

JO - I E E E Transactions on Engineering Management

JF - I E E E Transactions on Engineering Management

SN - 0018-9391

ER -