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Touched by the Hackathon: a study on the connection between Hackathon participants and start-up founders

Published: 26 August 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Time-bounded events such as hackathons, code fests and others have become a global phenomenon. Entrepreneurial hackathons in particular have gained wide spread popularity because they come with the prospect to being the grounds where the next billion dollar enterprise is born. There is however limited insight into whether and how hackathons participants and start-up founders are connected beyond studies on singular events focusing on hackathons as a starting point for start-ups. To address this gap we conducted a study on a dataset covering 44 hackathons over three years and 489 start-ups in the North-Eastern European country of Estonia. Our findings indicate that hackathons are not always the start of an entrepreneurial endeavor but can also be useful through later stages as a means to develop future products, find future employees and others. The results presented in this paper are based on an initial analysis of this rich dataset and thus present the starting point of a larger study on the connection between the hackathon and start-up communities which is currently in planning.

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cover image ACM Conferences
IWSiB 2019: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGSOFT International Workshop on Software-Intensive Business: Start-ups, Platforms, and Ecosystems
August 2019
59 pages
ISBN:9781450368544
DOI:10.1145/3340481
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 26 August 2019

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Author Tags

  1. Entrepreneurship
  2. Hackathon
  3. Start-up

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  • (2024)Can Hackathons Contribute to the Development of Entrepreneurship Among Students at All? Case Study of an Educational Cross Functional HackathonUnderstanding the Digital Transformation of Socio-Economic-Technological Systems10.1007/978-3-031-56677-6_3(31-47)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Startup Creation Beyond Hackathons – A Survey on Startup Development and SupportSoftware Business10.1007/978-3-031-53227-6_15(205-221)Online publication date: 9-Feb-2024
  • (2023)How to data in datathonsProceedings of the 37th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems10.5555/3666122.3666580(10440-10456)Online publication date: 10-Dec-2023
  • (2023)ACM SIGSOFT Towards Sustainable Software BusinessACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes10.1145/3573074.357309848:1(91-94)Online publication date: 17-Jan-2023
  • (2023)On Hackathons: A Multidisciplinary Literature ReviewProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581234(1-21)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
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  • (2023)Hack for impact – sociomateriality and the emergent structuration of social hackathonsJournal of Organizational Ethnography10.1108/JOE-12-2022-003612:2(223-241)Online publication date: 7-Jul-2023
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