Crisis Innovation: Leveraging Virtual Hackathons for Rapid Ideation

The COVID-19 crisis brought about an unprece�dented wave of interest into rapid ideation and innovation. Among others, the pandemic triggered a series of collaborative innovation
events—so-called hackathons—to leverage the power of the crowd for crisis response. In contrast to earlier hackathons, these events are different in their speed of mobilization, global scale, and their fully virtual nature with organizers and teams being geographically
dispersed. Analyzing this new empirical phenomenon, we char�acterize COVID-19 hackathons against other forms of innovation crowdsourcing and describe challenges and best practices in the areas of people management, session management, technology, and knowledge management. Based on our empirical findings, we develop a conceptual framework that emphasizes the importance of managing virtual crisis hackathons as the integrated sum of
its different parts. Empirical evidence is presented to demonstrate how open innovation efforts such as hackathons can be leveraged for crisis management and more generally for ideation activities in increasingly remote working environments. This article contributes
to crowdsourcing research by highlighting key differences of virtual hackathons from the traditional crowdsourcing approaches and hackathons investigated by prior research. Moreover, we affirm the value of mobilizing knowledge from different sources, particularly
from a broad spectrum of civil society.