Ask HN: Did your corporate hackathons result in new products or other benefits?

I'm interested to know.... if your company does hackathons, what were the tangible outcomes?

What did you see as other benefits coming out of the hackathons?

Fresh out of university in 2009 I worked as a graphic designer at a tiny UX/UI studio (4 including myself) that did contract work primarily for RIM (Blackberry). A year into this job, the founder surprised me with announcing that we would do a 2-week creative exploration (what I'd now call a hackathon)— everything else was put on hold completely. A ton of ideas (and fun) were had. We ended up shipping two iOS games over the next 6-12mo... that, frankly, didn't amount to much (in hindsight, how could it— we were all kids (<24yrs old) with 0 experience in games).

It was strange, interesting and amazing time.

at a former company, a large chunk of the roadmap came out of hackathon projects! in addition to that, it was a great way to set a culture of bottoms up innovation.

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