Hacking Away at Solutions

The concept of hackathons is still relatively novel to both the empirical and practical communities of The Netherlands. With the first hackathon arising in 2014, the 24-hour, competitive prototyping events have started to gain momentum. With hackathons being very intensive – most participants tend to stay up the entire 24-hours – it leaves many to wonder what motivates them to participate in hackathon anyways. Are hackathon goers motivated by extrinsic reasons (such as winning the prize) or by intrinsic reasons (to come and learn)? Furthermore, the researcher seeks to understand if hackathons can also be used as an effective brand strategy. Are hackathons merely just a hype, or can they further develop one’s brand? The study made use of qualitative methods of in-depth interviews, in which the researcher spoke to ten Dutch hackathon experts. The experts were mostly young and male, and tended to have their own small companies or start-ups. Furthermore, the researcher also noticed that the current community that participates in hackathons is rather niche and tightly interconnected; many interviewees knew the other research participants as well and see them frequently at hackathon events. The study proposes two conceptual models, the first which aims to look at different types of hackathons, extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, opportunity, and exposure; these variable, in turn, could lead to efficient brand strategy. Once the thematic analysis had been establish, the second, revised conceptual model introduced new concepts such as network and networking, learning, organizing hackathons, and reasons to organize hackathons. The respondents indicated that hackathons are all about fun for them, they want to learn more from each other, and learn new skills. They see hackathons as the ideal playground for them to play with different programming languages and to experiment with other disciplines. Hence, this must be kept in mind when one opts for organizing a hackathon. Lastly, although the hackathon teams are very multi-disciplinary there still seems to be a continuous issue of diversity – both gender and racial diversity.