Empowering Social Hackathons. Case study: Ethic Jobs in Agriculture

During these last years, several organizations are shifting to more open and collaborative innovation processes to enhance their innovative capabilities tapping external skills, experiences and knowledges. The result of this shift, to what is called Open Innovation model, is a powerful co-creation process that can also involve lead users, customers and other stakeholders. In this direction, an emerging innovation methodology is represented by the Hackathon event. Hackathons can be described as very short events, with a duration that usually goes from one to three days, in which different people gather to tackle a common challenge and propose a solution. These events, by the common belief, are originally and most often linked to the coding and technological context to develop a new software or prototyping a new product. However, as commonly agreed by some academics, hackathons are recently moving to a more-purpose related approach including community building, educational objectives or just knowledge sharing, as a very first step in the whole innovation process. This thesis project is focused on how the validity and the efficiency of these Hackathons’ intensive but time-limited events can be applied to the social innovation context. In order to do so, this work starts with the analysis of the main literature regarding the hackathon phenomenon, considering the traditional corporate setting. The results of this review have been used as a starting point to define the main steps and common principles for the organization of any hackathon, also highlighting related gaps, mainly due to time limit aspects that may reflect on the goals achievement. Merging and crossing Hackathon’s principles to the emerging approaches of designing for social innovation, important observations and reflections for the development of successful Social Hackathons came out. An important part of this thesis project has been the organization of the event “Ethic Jobs in Agriculture (EJA) entering in the core-team of Social Innovation Teams. We had the possibility to put in action Social Hackathon concepts, creating a different methodology that could go over the hackathons’ limits, with a specific event agenda. The project had a strategic plan, with a pre-activation phase and two workshop days spaced out by a period where participants could reflect on the development of the project and learn new content. The specific plan and duration of this project have confirmed our new methodology goals: participants were more involved and engaged, showing their interests to create long term connections and networking beyond the single event.