Innovation in Large-scale agile -- Benefits and Challenges of Hackathons when Hacking from Home

Hackathons are events in which diverse teams work together to explore, and develop solutions, software or even ideas. Hackathons have been recognized not only as public events for hacking, but also as a corporate mechanism for innovation. Hackathons are a way for established companies to achieve increased employee wellbeing as well as being a curator for innovation and developing new products. Sudden transition to the work-from-home mode caused by the COVID-19 pandemic first put many corporate events requiring collocation, such as hackathons, temporarily on hold and then motivated companies to find ways to hold these events virtually. In this paper, we report our findings from investigating hackathons in the context of a large agile company by first exploring the general benefits and challenges of hackathons and then trying to understand how they were affected by the virtual setup. We conducted nine interviews, surveyed 23 employees and analyzed a hackathon demo. We found that hackathons provide both individual and organizational benefits of innovation, personal interests, and acquiring new skills and competences. Several challenges such as added stress due to stopping the regular work, employees fearing not having enough contribution to deliver and potential mismatch between individual and organizational goals were also found. With respect to the virtual setup, we found that virtual hackathons are not diminishing the innovation benefits, however, some negative effect surfaced on the social and networking side

Improving productivity through corporate hackathons: A multiple case study of two large-scale agile organizations

Software development companies organize hackathons to encourage innovation. Despite many benefits of hackathons, in large-scale agile organizations where many teams work together, stopping the ongoing work results in a significant decrease in the immediate output. Motivated by the need to understand whether and how to run hackathons, we investigated how the practice affects productivity on the individual and organizational levels. By mapping the benefits and challenges to an established productivity framework, we found that hackathons improve developers' satisfaction and well-being, strengthen the company culture, improve performance (as many ideas are tested), increase activity (as the ideas are developed quickly), and improve communication and collaboration (because the social network is strengthened). Addressing managerial concerns, we found that hackathons also increase efficiency and flow because people learn to complete work and make progress quickly, and they build new competence. Finally, with respect to virtual hackathons we found that developers work more in isolation because tasks are split between team members resulting in less collaboration. This means that some important, expected hackathon values in virtual contexts require extra effort and cannot be taken for granted

FACILITATING EMPLOYEE-DRIVEN DIGITAL INNOVATION THROUGH THE USE OF HACKATHONS – A CASE STUDY

Open innovation has challenged and redefined the way organizations approach innovation and interact with stakeholders in the business environment. The democratization of work life has led to an increasing degree of inclusion of ordinary employees in the innovation processes, known as employee-driven innovation. Research on employee-driven innovation has up until now strongly focused on the characteristics and prerequisites for this form of innovation to arise. To a lesser extent, research has looked at how to facilitate the process of employee-driven innovation within organizations. Hackathons have emerged as a structured way to approach innovation in many organizations, especially software companies. In this study, we use a major international software company as a case study to look at the extent to which hackathons can facilitate employee-driven innovation, and especially digital innovation. We name this employee-driven digital innovation for two reasons: 1) because innovation processes are digitally mediated and 2) because the innovation products are also digital. Finally, based on theory from employee-driven innovation, we provide guidelines on how hackathons should be designed to increase the effects of hackathons as an enabler of employee-driven digital innovation

How to Data in Datathons

The rise of datathons, also known as data or data science hackathons, has provided a platform to collaborate, learn, and innovate in a short timeframe. Despite their significant potential benefits, organizations often struggle to effectively work with data due to a lack of clear guidelines and best practices for potential issues that might arise. Drawing on our own experiences and insights from organizing >80 datathon challenges with >60 partnership organizations since 2016, we provide guidelines and recommendations that serve as a resource for organizers to navigate the data-related complexities of datathons. We apply our proposed framework to 10 case studies.Comment: 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023) Track on Datasets and Benchmar

A User-centric Taxonomy for Conversational Generative Language Models

Conversational generative language models (GLMs) like ChatGPT are being rapidly adopted. Previous research on non-conversational GLMs showed that formulating prompts is critical for receiving good outputs. However, it is unclear how conversational GLMs are used when solving complex problems that require multi-step interactions. This paper addresses this research gap based on findings from a large participant event we conducted, where ChatGPT was iteratively and in a multi-step manner used while solving a complex problem. We derived a taxonomy of prompting behavior employed for solving complex problems as well as archetypes. While the taxonomy provides common knowledge on GLMs usage based on analyzed input-prompts, the different archetypes facilitate the classification of operators according to their usage. With both we provide exploratory knowledge and a foundation for design science research endeavors, which can be referred to, enabling further research and development of prompt engineering, prompting tactics, and prompting strategies on common ground

Literature Reviews in HCI: A Review of Reviews

This paper analyses Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) literature reviews to provide a clear conceptual basis for authors, reviewers, and readers. HCI is multidisciplinary and various types of literature reviews exist, from systematic to critical reviews in the style of essays. Yet, there is insufficient consensus of what to expect of literature reviews in HCI. Thus, a shared understanding of literature reviews and clear terminology is needed to plan, evaluate, and use literature reviews, and to further improve review methodology. We analysed 189 literature reviews published at all SIGCHI conferences and ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) up until August 2022. We report on the main dimensions of variation: (i) contribution types and topics; and (ii) structure and methodologies applied. We identify gaps and trends to inform future meta work in HCI and provide a starting point on how to move towards a more comprehensive terminology system of literature reviews in HCI