How Can Hackathons Facilitate Employee-Driven Digital Innovation in Public Organizations?

New approaches to innovation have emerged creating needs for new explanatory models for discussing, understanding and implementing innovation, among these employee-driven innovation. Employee-driven innovation appears as a direction within innovation where the focus is on ordinary employees and how these can contribute to innovation within already existing private and public organizations. This form of innovation has especially been seen as appropriate in relation to companies engaged in digital innovation, also formulated as employee-driven digital innovation. Innovation in public organizations has recently received more attention, but still appears to be under-researched in many contexts compared to private organizations. Not only have we received new approaches to innovation, but we have also seen the emergence of new ways of organizing and managing innovation. Hackathons have over time emerged and gained a role as a way to facilitate innovation in many organizations, especially organizations related to IT. Hackathons can therefore be perceived to have contributed to a movement towards more open innovation processes, both internally, but also in relation to the organizations' stakeholders externally. In this conceptual paper we will present and discuss how hackathons can act as a facilitator to spur employee-driven digital innovation in public organizations, and how we want to use hackathons as an artifact in a design science research approach to study employee-driven digital innovation in a public organization.