Hackathons as ephemeral adhocracies for Intellectual Capital (re)generation: An emerging framework

Hackathons are events that bring together people with diverse backgrounds and expertise in a single location over a limited time to develop disruptive ideas and artifacts. The skyrocketing success of Hackathons across various domains and sectors is due to the opportunities they offer to leverage the creative and Intellectual capacity of the crowd, and to develop new relationships, skills, knowledge, solutions, and processes. However, Hackathons’ potential in relation to Intellectual Capital (IC) has been overlooked by the literature so far, and few studies focus on their outcomes and evaluation. This study addresses this issue by conceptualizing Hackathons as ephemeral adhocracies whose value proposition includes the (re)generation of IC at the system level. Based on this conceptualization, we leverage the authors’ participant observation through active involvement in 57 Hackathons globally with various roles (i.e., participant, mentor, facilitator, jury, and organizer) between 2014-2020. Through iterative qualitative analysis carried out on the literature and empirical material, we identify 32 distinctive critical attributes through which Hackathons may differ from one another. We leverage the literature and the empirical material to highlight how each of these 32 attributes may influence the three key dimensions of IC (i.e., Human, Relational, and Structural). Our analysis offers a framework that can be useful for practitioners when approaching Hackathons and serve as a foundation for design and evaluation instruments, while opening the way for future research on Hackathons as emerging organizational forms specifically devoted to IC (re)generation.