Answer:

ver 80% of Fortune 100 companies conduct hackathons to drive innovation. More than 50% of the hackathons are recurring events, indicating that they are a reliable tool for sustained innovation.

HackerEarth analyzed close to 1000 hackathons conducted over a 2-year period around the globe. The U.S. leads the way with over 350 hackathons every year, followed by India and the U.K. Additionally, the survey found that private companies accounted for almost 50% of all hackathons conducted, universities hosted about 30%, and, interestingly, non-profit and government organizations conducted over 10%.

For more insights such as the following,

You can read the complete Global Hackathon Report here  

What is a hackathon?

Hackathon is a tool to drive sustained innovation and crowdsource solutions to address pressing real-life business problems and social issues. A hackathon is typically a time-bound competitive event where participants collaborate to build proofs of concept and minimum viable products for a specific pre-defined problem or to innovate.

Why should you conduct a hackathon?

Hackathons have some clear advantages over traditional innovation management processes. They are inclusive, agile, promote multidisciplinary collaboration, and have shorter innovation cycles that are better suited to addressing fast-changing consumer demands.

Along with generating new ideas and future proofing a business, hackathons help de-risk product development, improve employee engagement and retention, find excellent talent, enable customer focused innovation and engagement, accelerate the speed of innovation and problem solving, enhance collaboration between teams, bring about cost savings through R&D, and build community, brand, and leadership.

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How does a hackathon help in innovation?

“If you look at history, innovation does not come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect,” says Steven Johnson, an American author. In a way, hackathons complement traditional innovation methods. Through hackathons, companies harvest ideas and knowledge to take their technology to the next level. With the added advantage of crowd-driven ideation, companies can now move fast, reduce the time-to-market, and get ahead in the race.

Traditionally, the responsibility of coming up with innovative products, services, and business models was assigned only to a handful of people within the organization. Generally, a dedicated R&D or a specific unit for innovation was assigned to the task. Nowadays, companies, both big and small, conduct hackathons to drive innovation. With the way the workforce today is connected today, collaborative innovation is easy. Concrete ideas derived from hackathons have helped deliver top-notch products, better customer experience, and greater revenue.

Companies have interpreted the hackathon concept in various ways. However, McKinsey says that top companies haven’t fully understood the potential of hackathons as tools of disruptive innovation.

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