A Systematic Mapping Study on the Organisation of Corporate Hackathons

The hackathon phenomenon has just completed twenty years. During this period, it shifted from an event where highly skilled developers searched for bugs or randomly created a software solution to an organised event for exploring a set of technologies, challenges or themes. When promoted by software companies, these events are called corporate hackathons and mainly seek to improve their business activities by getting new ideas, prototypes or even business plans. By involving third parties, corporate hackathons become an open innovation strategy used by companies to ultimately leverage platforms and build a community of users around them, as a mechanism to establish a software ecosystem. This paper results from our motivation to understand how corporate hackathons are organised in IT industry. To achieve this goal, we performed a systematic mapping study on corporate hackathons, focusing on their process (i.e. steps involved in before, during and after a hackathon) and their main characteristics (goals, participants, duration, location, and application domain). As main contribution, we reveal organisation patterns and provide recommendations for companies aiming to conduct hackathons.