CIOs must approach internal hackathons strategically to succeed in engaging technical talent, fostering cross-functional collaboration, and, most importantly, driving innovation and transforming culture.
Typically associated with startups and small developer teams, hackathons are becoming increasingly popular with enterprise CIOs as a means for jump-starting innovation. But ensuring a hackathon produces tangible value for the business can be challenging.
And it starts with establishing a meaningful rationale for organizing one in the first place. Enterprises should not organize hackathons because they are in vogue or because leadership hopes to achieve vaguely defined results. They must have tangible and legitimate reasons for doing so.
[ Learn how to create a culture of innovation and the mistakes that can tank your innovation efforts. ]
Rock Tsai, CIO of Taiwan Mobile, a leading telco in Taiwan, says hackathons encourage innovation, especially among the IT team, which can sometimes be an innovation stopper instead of an enabler.
“[It was] the same in our company. Maybe several years ago, when the business unit asked for help with new services or new process innovations, the IT team often responded that it’s not in the plan, there’s no manpower, there’s no budget, or it’s not feasible. So actually, we want to spark IT’s passion for innovation through hackathons,” Tsai says.
This type of hackathon is what Tsai refers to as an “inside-out” hackathon, one that is exclusive to the IT staff. The inside-out hackathon contrasts with the more common “outside-in” hackathon, which involves participation from across the company and adopts the customer’s point of view as a guiding light.
While each approach has its benefits — Taiwan Mobile organizes both — Tsai says that the inside-out hackathon can increase buy-in from the IT team. For example, Taiwan Mobile recently had an AI hackathon to give developers ownership through a simple fact of human nature: “People always believe in the idea that they propose themselves,” Tsai says.
Tsai says this developer support will persist even as the exact idea or implementation inevitably changes. “Maybe the final proposal is different from the original one proposed by IT people. But because the IT people have already been motivated to innovate, it will make them truly believe in the change,” Tsai says.
Get specific — with tech and use case
If organizations have a strong basis for organizing a hackathon, they should not make them open-ended. Leah Balter, chief information and transformation officer at Bunnings, a retailer of home improvement products in Australia, has experienced this challenge firsthand.
“When we’ve gone broad — where you could sort of be working on anything — we found that that’s where it didn’t work too well,” she says.
Balter explains that most ideas produced from these general hackathons were not production-ready. “There were nice concepts. They look good, but there wasn’t something that we could roll out as a business [to bring] major business impact [when] implementing them,” she says.
Balter recommends hackathons built around a specific technology, use case, or both, as in the case of Bunnings’ most recent hackathon, which sought to leverage generative AI to improve productivity or sales.
“Within a two-hour period, I had 25 ideas pitched to me, which really got me thinking: The top 10 of these we should be doing, and we should be doing in the next three months,” says Balter.
One of the winning ideas used generative AI to streamline the learning process for do-it-yourself (DIY) home projects. Rather than sifting through dozens of videos, this tool would serve the right snippets and advice to match the products a person had in their cart and could even consider what items they already had at home. This tool was a novel application of generative AI (which was part of the official judging criteria) and could also increase sales.
The theme for the hackathon at Taiwan Mobile was similarly built around both a technology and a use case. Tsai says developers were tasked with proposing ideas incorporating AI into their IT systems.
Balter advises CIOs to consider organizing thematic hackathons to get this concentration of strong ideas.
“If we hadn’t had the hackathon, that could have taken months and months of strategy work,” she says. “Then we work out, ‘What are we going to do? How do we fund this?’ And this was just a really great way to accelerate that whole process and get the best ideas.”
Blend teams for best results
The very name “hackathon” implies that participants should be “hackers” — technical people, typically developers and designers, with a clever knack for solving problems. While this limitation may be valid for traditional hackathons, those organized within enterprises should invite a broader range of participants.
Though the notion of an “ideas person” is typically met with chagrin from technical people, Aran Azarzar, CIO of JFrog, a DevOps and DevSecOps platform maker with headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., and Israel, argues that they are beneficial for that very reason.
“Each group should have some nontechnical people, some disruptive person to come up with ideas without the technical barriers that [developers] have in mind,” says Azarzar.
Azarzar says that the best ideas come from these nontechnical people. Unfortunately, getting this type of person to volunteer is tough, he says, so IT leaders must be proactive in soliciting their participation when organizing hackathons.
“It’s a challenge because not everyone understands their value. You need to identify those individuals in advance and to understand where you want to put them,” he says.
Building buzz
To put this strategy into practice, organizations cannot just decide to organize a hackathon and hope that the spirit of collaboration will bring everyone together to execute. Azarzar says an end-to-end owner must manage everything from the facilities management and ideation to the team formulation and the actual competition.
Bunnings’ Balter also actively seeks out companywide participation, which is accomplished through internal communications around the hackathon. She says that Bunnings rolls out a campaign that involves online channels such as its social media workspace and offline channels such as in-office banners and posters. The imagery on all collaterals emphasizes people coming together to create.
“So showing the cross-functional collaboration: the team members from different teams working together,” says Balter.
Azarzar puts similar care into the internal communications around JFrog’s hackathons. Instead of announcing all the event’s details at once, the company rolls out information bit by bit, like teasers for a Hollywood movie. First, the company will lead with a general event announcement, then follow with more details in a presentation a few days later until its full scope and mechanics are divulged.
Azarzar says that this approach creates a companywide buzz.
“If you slowly reveal the competition, you are touching their sense of curiosity. This makes them feel they want to be a part of it,” he says.
Multidisciplinary collaboration is also crucial for Tsai’s two-pronged approach to hackathons. If inside-out hackathons are designed to accelerate buy-in from developers, outside-in hackathons serve the broader purpose of taking the customer’s point of view. For this to occur, teams from across the company should participate, including those with frequent contact with customers, such as marketing or salespeople. “And what they have to propose is new services of the company or new products of the company,” Tsai explains of their end goal.
Success begins when the hackathon ends
Like business conferences, hackathons are exciting affairs that can fizzle out once the event is done. The brilliant ideas may plateau as a prototype or pitch deck. The cross-functional team, which gelled together so well for 48 hours, may be relegated to passing hellos in the hallway. The judges, who carefully selected the winners, may never think about them again.
For hackathons to succeed, there must be continuity between the event and the business reality of the organization.
This continuity must begin with the choice of judges. A popular option is to parachute in tech stars external to the company for this task or tap only the organization’s technical leaders. In contrast to these approaches, Balter says there should be broad participation from senior executives. For example, Balter was among three C-suite leaders on the Bunnings’ recently concluded hackathon judging panel.
According to Balter, the C-suite presence is not just for optics but is meant to signal a deeper message to participants.
“It really shows that they have to pitch their idea to senior executives,” she says. “That I commit we will fund and go into production with the winning idea or top two ideas.”
Balter says the winners at their last hackathon were awarded gold-class movie tickets with food and drink packages. The prize also advances the idea that the team has reached a significant milestone on a longer journey.
“That sort of size of prize is appropriate because they’ve got sort of the recognition that they’re the winner, but it’s great for them as a team — or with their partner or family — to be able to go out and celebrate,” she says.
Azarzar says that winning ideas at JFrog are scrutinized across a broad list of requirements. Is it robust enough to scale? Is it relevant or creative enough? Are there enough people to support it? And if there are, do they even want to?
“There are so many points that you need to identify before pushing it into production, but if it will solve a real pain, it will go through production,” he says.
Tsai tweaked the timing of Taiwan Mobile’s hackathons to improve post-hackathon continuity.
“We aligned the hackathons with the annual planning cycle so that the winning proposals could get support in the next annual budget,” he says.
Tsai says winning teams are provided an interim budget to support initial development and business planning as part of this process. Upon completing this exercise, they can then submit a proposal to the planning team for the opportunity to obtain an even larger budget.
Besides funding, team members may also have some of their time sponsored. Tsai says that team members can allocate a certain amount of their working hours toward the proposal with approval from their line manager.
Balter takes a similar approach at Bunnings by aligning hackathons with tech capacity planning.
“[The winning idea] sort of gets slotted straight into quarterly planning so that we can then make sure that the idea is implemented. So the team knows that they won’t have to go on and justify a business case,” she says.
Investing in winning proposals may produce a virtuous cycle. In addition to backing the implementation in question, this support will help attract and retain talented developers who want to work on exciting projects.
“[It shows them] we’re constantly focused on innovation. So it’s not just working on the BAU [business as usual] — we’re always looking to the third horizon of ideas that will help the business and help pivot the business,” says Balter.
Backing hackathon proposals also advances collaboration and culture around problem-solving at the organization. Here, Azarzar gives two key reasons why CIOs should consider organizing hackathons.
“First, if you have a real pain that you want to solve quickly and you want all hands-on deck. Second, you want to encourage innovation in the organization,” he says.
Transforming culture
Azarzar’s point about encouraging innovation is worth further analysis. Most professionals may view hackathons as a business activity that creates innovation. Rarely do people view hackathons as a way to create an innovation culture.
Tsai’s experience at Taiwan Mobile lends credence to this idea. Since beginning their hackathons, he has seen the culture improve yearly. While the company has rolled out numerous products and improvements as a direct result of hackathons, he believes the real advantage is in the more profound shift in employee perspective, which leads to them pitching more ideas, even when no prize is at stake.
“I think the real benefit is to change employees’ mindset … that they can be an innovator, that they want to be an innovator, and that they can innovate on their job,” he says.
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