DARE2HACK: Crowdsourcing ideas through hackathons to codesign new human-centric services

Organizations are continuously looking for ways to transform by adopting new practices and technologies in order to become more competitive. They target business growth by increasing their efficiencies, by improving their internal operations and/or delivering novel value-added products and services. This is not easy to accomplish, as it requires defining a new strategy, changing the way of working, training and engaging employees and interacting with the customers to address different global trends.One major challenge companies are facing is how to shift to collaboratively designing new services enabled by digital technologies, integrating talent from an ecosystem of experts. To design new services, organizations can start by reflecting on how they currently execute their innovation process. This latter is all about transforming ideas, data and knowledge into products or services launched successfully to the market. To accelerate their performance, organizations have been changing their practices, from working exclusively in-house to openly collaborating with external talent. Crowdsourcing refers to the necessary activities to collect “out-of-the-box” ideas in order to benefit from the collective brainpower of diverse entrepreneurial individuals and/or their own employees. A Hackathon could be defined as a crowd-sourcing contest, in which a diverse talented crowd is asked to solve a business challenge within 1 to 2 days and only the winners receive compensation or an award. Although hackathons originally focused on coding, lately organizations have been increasingly organizing them to solve business challenges while applying customer-centric approaches such as Design Thinking. This paper provides the foundations to link these approaches and provide insights about a hackathon that enabled innovation experts from different organizations to provide their ideas and identify key services to be delivered by an innovation hub.