Unleashing innovation through internal hackathons

Hackathons have become an increasingly popular approach for organizations to both test their new products and services as well as to generate new ideas. Most events either focus on attracting external developers or requesting employees of the organization to focus on a specific problem. In this paper we describe extensions to this paradigm that open up the event to internal employees and preserve the open-ended nature of the hackathon itself. In this paper we describe our initial motivation and objectives for conducting an internal hackathon, our experience in pioneering an internal hackathon at AT&T including specific things we did to make the internal hackathon successful. We conclude with the benefits (both expected and unexpected) we achieved from the internal hackathon approach, and recommendations for continuing the use of this valuable tool within AT&T.