Learnings and Implications of Virtual Hackathon

This article introduces a large-scale virtual hackathon where we observed the way participants found collaborators and undertook innovation processes entirely in the virtual world. As an emerging social-technical practice, the virtual hackathon leverages the power of familiar strangers, the improvisation of low-cost digital services, and the crowdsourcing mechanism to enable open innovation under the constraint of physical distancing. This study contributes to the research by introducing and conceptualizing a modified artifact - virtual hackathon. The implication of and the lessons learnt from the virtual hackathon are applicable and generalizable to organizations when managing virtual collaborations, digital infrastructure, and open innovation.