Minimal and Adaptive Coordination: How Hackathons’ Projects Accelerate Innovation without Killing it

67 Pages Posted: 6 Dec 2018 Last revised: 6 May 2020

See all articles by Hila Lifshitz-Assaf

Hila Lifshitz-Assaf

Harvard University Lab for Innovation Sciences; Harvard LISH, Lab for Innovation Sciences

Sarah Lebovitz

University of Virginia - McIntire School of Commerce

Lior Zalmanson

Coller School of Management -Tel Aviv University

Date Written: April 20, 2020

Abstract

The innovation journey of new product development processes often spans weeks or months. Recently, hackathons have turned the journey into an ad hoc sprint of only a couple of days using new tools and technologies. Existing research predicts such conditions would result in failure to produce new working products, yet hackathons often lead to functioning innovative products. To investigate this puzzle, we closely studied the product development process of 13 comparable projects in assistive technology hackathons. We find that accelerating innovation created temporal ambiguity, as it was unclear how to coordinate the challenging work within such an extremely limited and ad hoc time frame. Multiple projects worked to reduce this ambiguity, importing temporal structures from organizational innovation processes and compressing them to fit the extremely limited and ad-hoc time frame. They worked in full coordination to build a new product. They all failed. Only projects that sustained the temporal ambiguity – by working with merely a minimal basis for coordination and let new temporal structures emerge - were able to produce functioning new products under the intense time pressure. This study contributes to theories on innovation processes, coordination, and temporality.

Keywords: innovation, hackathons, temporality, new product development, coordination

Suggested Citation

Lifshitz-Assaf, Hila and Lebovitz, Sarah and Zalmanson, Lior, Minimal and Adaptive Coordination: How Hackathons’ Projects Accelerate Innovation without Killing it (April 20, 2020). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3280219 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3280219

Hila Lifshitz-Assaf (Contact Author)

Harvard University Lab for Innovation Sciences ( email )

Soldiers Field Road
Cotting House 321A
Boston, MA 02163
United States

Harvard LISH, Lab for Innovation Sciences ( email )

William James Hall, Sixth Floor
33 Kirkland Street
Cambridge, MA 02138

Sarah Lebovitz

University of Virginia - McIntire School of Commerce ( email )

P.O. Box 400173
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4173
United States

Lior Zalmanson

Coller School of Management -Tel Aviv University ( email )

Ramat Aviv
Tel-Aviv, 6997801
Israel

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