Does It Make Sense to Hack Online? – A Multiple Case Study on Team Collaboration in Remote Hackathons

Abstract

Hackathons are rapid design and development events used by organisations to maintain their competitive advantage, create innovations, and explore new business opportunities. Until lately, hackathons have been primarily in-person events where collocated teams solve challenges of interest to them. However, due to the global COVID-19 pandemics and work shifting online, remote hackathons have become the norm. The research around the remote hackathon phenomena is still being developed. Thus, this study contributes to exploring the remote hackathon topic from a collaborative aspect. More specifically, the way teams collaborate in a remote setting and the effect of the hackathon setting on collaboration. The findings indicate that some characteristics of in-person hackathons, such as preparing for the hackathon and extensive mentoring, could also be identified in the remote setting. However, other affordances, like networking and interaction with other teams, have noticeably diminished. The contribution of the thesis is a set of guidelines for hackathon participants and organizers to better cope with the online format of hackathons.