Does It Make Sense to Hack Online? – A Multiple Case Study on Team Collaboration in Remote Hackathons
Name
Tähe-Kai Tillo
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 chal-lenges 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 collab-orate in a remote setting and the effect of the hackathon setting on collaboration. The find-ings 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 dimin-ished. The contribution of the thesis is a set of guidelines for hackathon participants and or-ganizers to better cope with the online format of hackathons.
Graduation Thesis language
English
Graduation Thesis type
Master - Innovation and Technology Management
Supervisor(s)
Alexander Nolte
Defence year
2021