Journal of Entrepreneurship, Management and Innovation (2025)
Volume 21 Issue 4: 152-158
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7341/20252147
JEL Codes: O31, O32, M13, L26, D83, O35
Joanna Pousset, Ph.D., Professor of Economics and Finance, TBS Business School, Carrer de Veneçuela, 116, 08019 Barcelona, Spain, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 
David Stolin, Ph.D., Professor of Finance, TBS Business School, 20 bd. Lascrosses, 31000 Toulouse, France, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Abstract
This review examines Maciej Rys’s book Sparks for Innovation: Why Hackathons Work and How to Organize One (Columbia University Press, 2025), an interdisciplinary exploration of how hackathons have evolved from grassroots programming events into institutionalized tools of innovation, education, and civic engagement. The book’s ambition lies in bridging academic theory with practitioner insight, combining conceptual analysis, ethnographic observation, and practical frameworks. It situates hackathons within broader innovation theory, linking them to Schumpeterian creative destruction, open innovation, and learning-by-doing. Rys’s hybrid perspective as both researcher and organizer enables a reflexive treatment of hackathons as ‘organized creativity’ – spaces where structure and improvisation co-exist. While the book’s inclusiveness sometimes results in conceptual dispersion, its interdisciplinary synthesis remains a notable strength. The review argues that Sparks for Innovation is essential reading for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers seeking to understand the evolving infrastructure of innovation and collaboration. It also suggests that Rys’s approach invites a reflexive application: the adaptation of hackathon logic to academic research contexts as catalysts for collective knowledge creation.
Keywords: hackathons, innovation, open innovation, organized creativity, collective intelligence, research collaboration
Review of the book by Rys, M. (2025). Sparks for innovation: Why hackathons work and how to organize one. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. ISBN: 9780231214681
INTRODUCTION
Hackathons have evolved from niche gatherings of programmers into emblematic rituals of the contemporary innovation economy. Initially conceived as time-bound competitions to develop software prototypes, they have since been adopted across domains ranging from civic technology and education to healthcare and finance. Today, corporations, public institutions, and universities employ hackathons not only as vehicles for rapid problem-solving but also as instruments of organizational learning and community engagement. Yet, despite their proliferation, academic research on hackathons remains fragmented across disciplinary boundaries – computer science, management studies, and the social sciences – each treating the phenomenon through its own lens.
In this landscape, Maciej Rys’s (2025) Sparks for Innovation represents a major effort to consolidate these dispersed insights into a coherent framework. The book seeks to explain how hackathons operate as structured processes of organized creativity, exploring their design principles, participant dynamics, and broader implications for innovation ecosystems. Rys positions hackathons as both a microcosm and a metaphor for contemporary innovation – spaces where temporal constraint, interdisciplinarity, and collective intelligence converge to accelerate ideation and experimentation.
What sets Rys’s contribution apart is his dual identity as both scholar and practitioner. Drawing on his experience as a hackathon organizer and participant, he combines empirical observations with conceptual reflection, offering a narrative that is at once analytical and experiential. This methodological hybridity grants the work a level of depth that purely theoretical accounts often lack. Rys does not merely describe hackathons; he situates them within the genealogy of innovation thought, from Schumpeter’s notion of creative destruction to the contemporary emphasis on open and distributed innovation.
The book’s central claim – that hackathons constitute a unique organizational form of creativity under constraint – is developed across six chapters that blend theory, ethnography, and practice. These chapters examine the conceptual roots of innovation, the psychological and social dynamics of hackathon teams, the design of events and evaluation mechanisms, and the long-term trajectories of post-hackathon projects. Each component reveals a different facet of how hackathons mediate between structure and spontaneity, competition and collaboration, short-term creativity and long-term impact.
Rys’s account is ambitious in scope and interdisciplinary in spirit. It draws upon management theory, design studies, and the sociology of technology to frame hackathons as arenas where institutional structures are temporarily suspended, allowing participants to engage in accelerated cycles of ideation, prototyping, and reflection. The book is equally concerned with outcomes – the tangible prototypes that emerge – and with the process itself: the learning, motivation, and social bonds forged through participation.
Importantly, Rys’s narrative situates hackathons within the larger innovation discourse that includes design thinking, lean startup methodologies, and open innovation (Chesbrough, 2003; Bogers et al., 2017). Like these approaches, hackathons operationalize the idea that innovation can be engineered through the deliberate orchestration of diversity, time pressure, and feedback. Nevertheless, unlike continuous innovation frameworks, hackathons embrace discontinuity and intensity: they condense creativity into a single temporal burst. In this sense, Rys portrays them not as exceptions but as exemplars of twenty-first-century innovation culture.
While the book’s breadth and hybridity are among its greatest strengths, they also introduce challenges. The narrative occasionally shifts between conceptual analysis and anecdotal reportage, risking a sense of fragmentation. Yet this fragmentation mirrors the nature of hackathons themselves: transient, pluralistic, and inherently hybrid. As Rys’s review of the phenomenon suggests, to write about hackathons coherently may already mean to embrace a certain degree of methodological messiness.
In doing so, Rys produces a work that bridges academic inquiry and professional practice. His reflections resonate with both researchers seeking conceptual clarity and practitioners searching for insight into why hackathons succeed – or fail – as innovation mechanisms. Ultimately, Sparks for Innovation contributes not only to understanding hackathons but also to reframing how we conceptualize innovation as a distributed, participatory, and time-compressed process.
Conceptual foundations: From innovation theory to the logic of hackathons
At its foundation, Rys’s book undertakes a careful reconstruction of the intellectual lineage of innovation theory. The discussion begins with Schumpeter’s (1934) view of innovation as the driving force of economic evolution – “creative destruction” – where entrepreneurial energy continually reshapes the industrial landscape. By linking this classic economic model to more recent frameworks of organizational learning and cognitive psychology, Rys builds a bridge from the macroeconomic to the micro-social level of creativity.
He pairs Schumpeter with Edward de Bono’s (1970) distinction between lateral and vertical thinking, arguing that hackathons are structured environments for lateral thinking under temporal constraint. They institutionalize divergence and convergence within fixed boundaries of time and theme. This connection between cognitive theory and organizational design exemplifies Rys’s interdisciplinary approach.
From there, he engages with open innovation theory (Chesbrough, 2003), which holds that valuable ideas can originate both inside and outside organizational boundaries. Hackathons, Rys contends, are among the most visible instantiations of open innovation in practice: they mobilize external contributors, internal employees, and diverse stakeholders to co-create solutions in public view. This mechanism dissolves the boundary between producers and users of innovation, reflecting von Hippel’s (2005) concept of user innovation.
Rys situates hackathons within the broader family of organized creativity mechanisms – including design sprints, idea challenges, and innovation labs – but highlights their distinctive temporality and intensity. The “temporal compression” of a hackathon, he argues, is not merely logistical but epistemic: it accelerates learning cycles by forcing participants to externalize and test ideas rapidly. This resonates with Schön’s (1983) theory of the reflective practitioner, where action and reflection are intertwined in iterative loops of experimentation.
To illustrate this, Rys revisits historical episodes such as Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory, the Wright brothers’ workshop, and the discovery of penicillin. Each example, while far removed from modern hackathons, demonstrates how constrained collaboration and prototyping have long been engines of discovery. By positioning hackathons as the latest iteration of this lineage, Rys transforms what could have been a trendy topic into a historically grounded argument about the evolution of innovation practices.
The theoretical framework is further enriched by engagement with innovation systems literature (Lundvall, 1992; Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff, 2000). Hackathons are portrayed as microcosms of the “Triple Helix” model – university, industry, and government collaboration compressed into a short-lived, high-intensity form. In this view, hackathons simulate the dynamics of broader innovation ecosystems but in a controlled, time-bounded experiment.
Yet Rys does not romanticize this model. He recognizes the paradox that institutionalizing creativity may undermine its spontaneity. By formalizing hackathons, organizations risk turning them into performative rituals devoid of genuine innovation. This tension between authenticity and instrumentalization – between the creative and the corporate – is one of the recurring motifs of the book.
In articulating these contradictions, Rys contributes to ongoing debates about the commodification of innovation (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005). The hackathon, in his reading, exemplifies how contemporary capitalism celebrates creativity while disciplining it within measurable, manageable formats. Yet Rys’s tone remains balanced: he neither dismisses hackathons as empty spectacle nor glorifies them as revolutionary. Instead, he treats them as organizational artefacts that crystallize both the promises and perils of innovation culture.
Perhaps the most significant theoretical insight of Rys’s book lies in its treatment of hackathons as liminal spaces – borrowing from anthropological theory (Turner, 1969). During a hackathon, normal organizational hierarchies and routines are suspended, creating a temporary community bound by shared focus and intensity. This liminality enables experimentation, but it also ensures that the space remains exceptional and ephemeral. When the event ends, participants must re-enter the structured world of work or academia, often facing the dissonance between the temporary freedom of the hackathon and the constraints of their everyday environments.
Rys’s conceptualization of hackathons as both process and metaphor is particularly compelling. As process, they are concrete methods for generating ideas; as metaphor, they symbolize the broader societal drive toward speed, agility, and collaboration in innovation. This dual framing allows Rys to speak simultaneously to scholars of management, cultural sociology, and design.
If there is a limitation in this theoretical section, it lies in the challenge of synthesis. The book draws upon such a wide range of theoretical traditions that some readers may feel disoriented. However, this very eclecticism mirrors the interdisciplinary nature of hackathons themselves, which bring together coders, designers, marketers, and strategists. In this sense, the theoretical “messiness” of the book becomes conceptually appropriate – a reflection of its object of study.
Hackathons as organized creativity
One of the most illuminating contributions of Sparks for Innovation lies in its portrayal of hackathons as laboratories of organized creativity. Rys demonstrates that hackathons do not represent a spontaneous burst of innovation but rather a carefully designed framework that channels creativity through constraint. This paradox – freedom through structure – sits at the heart of his analysis.
The author conceptualizes hackathons as “innovation microcosms,” where time, space, and social interaction are deliberately configured to foster accelerated problem-solving. They rely on temporal limitation (usually 24 – 72 hours), interdisciplinary composition of teams, iterative feedback loops, and the ritual of final presentations. These design elements serve not to restrict creativity but to generate focus and momentum. The result is a temporary social order oriented toward experimentation, in which failure is not only tolerated but expected as part of the process.
Rys situates this within the broader scholarship on creative process design (Moeran & Christensen, 2013; Hargadon & Bechky, 2006), showing that innovation is rarely a product of individual genius but of carefully staged collective interaction. Hackathons, in this view, exemplify the managed spontaneity of contemporary innovation culture: a choreography of serendipity. What appears chaotic from the outside is, in practice, the product of deliberate orchestration – schedules, mentoring frameworks, and milestone reviews ensure that creativity remains bounded yet productive.
The book’s ethnographic insights vividly illustrate this tension. Rys recounts how hackathon facilitators balance logistical efficiency with the creation of a psychologically safe environment that invites play, improvisation, and risk-taking. He describes the “liminal intensity” of late-night coding sessions, the improvisational negotiations between designers and engineers, and the role of mentors as both catalysts and constraints. These episodes reveal the fragile equilibrium between autonomy and coordination that sustains innovation under pressure.
A particularly compelling aspect of Rys’s argument is his interpretation of hackathons as ritualized performances of innovation. Drawing on anthropological perspectives, he argues that hackathons serve a symbolic function within organizations: they make innovation visible, tangible, and measurable. Through slogans, visual identity, and ceremonial closure (awards, pitches, applause), organizations reaffirm their commitment to creativity and agility. This “innovation theatre” dimension may be criticized for superficiality, yet Rys suggests it performs an important cultural role – transforming innovation from abstract aspiration into embodied practice.
The book also advances a nuanced typology of hackathon formats – corporate, civic, academic, and grassroots – each reflecting distinct institutional logic. Corporate hackathons emphasize product pipelines and employer branding; civic hackathons prioritize open data and collective problem-solving; academic hackathons foster interdisciplinarity and experiential learning; and grassroots hackathons emphasize community and autonomy. Rys’s comparative treatment underscores how hackathons adapt flexibly to the objectives of their hosts while maintaining a recognizable structural core.
Nevertheless, Rys remains cautious about managerial appropriation of the hackathon form. When corporate settings instrumentalize hackathons for public relations or low-cost ideation, the participatory ethos that once defined them risks erosion. Here, Rys aligns with critical innovation scholars who warn that the institutionalization of creativity can neutralize its transformative potential (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005). Yet he concludes that even when outcomes are symbolic or fleeting, hackathons retain pedagogical and cultural value – they train participants to think experimentally and to collaborate across boundaries.
Methodological and analytical reflections
Rys’s methodological stance mirrors the hybridity of his subject. He combines literature synthesis, qualitative interviews, and participant observation across multiple events, blending academic analysis with practitioner reflexivity. This mixed-method approach yields a text that oscillates between theory, narrative, and self-reflection. It may challenge readers seeking linear argumentation, yet it is uniquely suited to capture the emergent, improvisational quality of hackathon dynamics.
The book does not claim methodological purity. Instead, it embodies what Denzin and Lincoln (2018) describe as the interpretive turn in qualitative research: the acknowledgement that researchers are not neutral observers but active participants in meaning-making. Rys’s insider position – as organizer, mentor, and analyst – becomes a methodological asset. It allows him to access backstage processes often invisible to external researchers, such as facilitator decisions, team conflicts, or the subtle cues that shape collaboration under stress.
This reflexive embeddedness distinguishes Rys’s work from survey-based studies that treat hackathons as isolated events. His field observations reveal how participant motivation evolves throughout the event, how time pressure shapes decision-making, and how feedback mechanisms influence team trajectories. The ethnographic vignettes – ranging from corporate to grassroots hackathons – create an empirical texture that grounds theoretical claims.
At the same time, Rys recognizes the epistemological tension of studying a phenomenon that celebrates speed and iteration. Hackathons privilege immediacy, while academic inquiry values depth and reflection. The book, therefore, embodies a productive methodological paradox: it is itself an exercise in slowing down to study acceleration. Rys’s method can be read as a meta-hackathon – a reflective prototype of how to research rapid innovation processes without succumbing to their tempo.
Analytically, the book balances interpretive and evaluative lenses. On one hand, Rys aims to understand hackathons as social systems that generate meaning and community. On the other hand, he evaluates their effectiveness as innovation mechanisms. This dual focus results in a multidimensional model of hackathon impact that extends beyond traditional metrics such as the number of prototypes or patents. He identifies four interrelated levels of value creation:
- Individual learning and empowerment, as participants acquire technical, social, and emotional skills.
- Team and network formation, as temporary collaborations evolve into long-term professional ties.
- Organizational renewal, through exposure to external ideas and cross-functional experimentation.
- Ecosystemic contribution, whereby hackathons strengthen local or thematic innovation communities.
This model resonates with contemporary innovation-ecosystem frameworks (Bogers et al., 2017; Lifshitz-Assaf, 2018) and with theories of learning-by-interaction (Lundvall, 1992). By integrating these perspectives, Rys extends hackathon research beyond the question “Do they work?” to “How, for whom, and under what conditions do they create value?”
Methodologically, this is significant: it reframes hackathons not as one-off events but as nodes in continuous learning systems. The analytical emphasis thus shifts from artefacts (prototypes) to relationships and capabilities. Rys encourages readers to evaluate hackathons not by the survival of projects but by the transformations they trigger in participants and institutions. This reorientation provides a conceptual foundation for longitudinal and comparative studies of innovation rituals.
The book’s methodological openness also invites future researchers to experiment with participatory and design-based inquiry approaches that treat the research process itself as an intervention. In that sense, Rys’s work models a scholarly ethos consistent with the hackathon spirit: iterative, collaborative, and oriented toward practical insight.
Implications and future directions
Beyond description and critique, Rys’s book gestures toward the future of innovation practice and research. Its implications unfold along three interrelated dimensions: conceptual, practical, and reflexive.
Conceptually, the book expands the vocabulary of innovation studies. By treating hackathons as both process and metaphor, it bridges micro-level creativity studies with macro-level institutional analysis. It reframes innovation as a performative, time-bounded, and collective practice – an insight relevant to scholars exploring the temporalities of innovation and organizational learning. The notion of “temporal laboratories” that compress experimentation into bounded intervals could, for instance, inform comparative studies of accelerators, bootcamps, or policy sprints.
Practically, Sparks for Innovation functions as a reflective guide for organizers, educators, and policymakers. It distils design principles – time pressure, diversity, mentorship, narrative framing – that determine hackathon outcomes. For corporate innovation managers, it offers a lens to evaluate hackathons not only by immediate results but by their contribution to organizational culture and capability building. For educators, it illustrates how hackathons can serve as pedagogical tools that combine experiential learning with interdisciplinary collaboration. For policymakers, it highlights the potential of hackathons as agile instruments of civic participation and digital transformation.
For academics, an interesting question is whether academia could adopt hackathon-like formats to accelerate collaboration, co-creation, and dissemination. This idea of “research hackathons” – time-bound, interdisciplinary gatherings organized around shared datasets or societal challenges – invites a rethinking of scholarly practice. It echoes the ethos of open science and aligns with calls for more collaborative, problem-driven research (Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff, 2000; Fecher & Friesike, 2014).
Such reflexive application underscores the book’s broader message: hackathons are not merely organizational tools but cultural prototypes of how innovation might be organized across domains. They exemplify the transition from hierarchical R&D to networked, participatory models of knowledge creation. Rys’s optimism is cautious – he acknowledges that hackathons often produce short-lived outcomes – but his analysis suggests that their greatest value lies in reshaping how people relate to creativity, uncertainty, and collective intelligence.
Looking ahead, the book opens multiple research avenues. Empirically, there is a need for longitudinal studies tracing the afterlives of hackathon projects, networks, and careers. Conceptually, further work could explore the ethical dimensions of unpaid creative labor, inclusion, and sustainability within hackathon ecosystems. Methodologically, scholars could test hybrid research designs – combining ethnography, digital trace analysis, and experimental interventions – to capture the multilayered dynamics of time-bounded innovation.
In conclusion, Rys’s work stands as both a synthesis and an invitation. It consolidates dispersed insights from management, sociology, and design, while encouraging scholars and practitioners to continue iterating on the hackathon model itself. The book’s imperfections – its breadth, its occasional fragmentation – are inseparable from its ambition to capture a phenomenon that resists linear explanation. Sparks for Innovation thus succeeds not by offering definitive answers but by articulating new questions about how creativity can be organized, accelerated, and sustained in an era defined by speed and collaboration.
Relevance for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers
Rys’s Sparks for Innovation stands out for its capacity to speak across audiences. It contributes simultaneously to academic theory, managerial practice, and public policy – an achievement rare in a domain often polarized between technical manuals and abstract conceptual work.
For scholars, the book offers the first comprehensive and interdisciplinary synthesis of hackathons as both organizational and cultural phenomena. It systematically connects hackathon practice to core frameworks of innovation theory – open innovation (Chesbrough, 2003), user innovation (von Hippel, 2005), and innovation systems (Lundvall, 1992; Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff, 2000) – while also engaging with design research and the sociology of work. Its conceptualization of hackathons as liminal spaces of organized creativity introduces a theoretical lens with potential to enrich adjacent literatures on temporary organizations, project-based learning, and innovation rituals. For scholars of entrepreneurship and management, Rys provides both a taxonomy of hackathon types and a model of their multi-level impact, which can inform empirical and comparative studies.
For practitioners, especially innovation managers, educators, and community organizers, the book functions as a reflective toolkit. It moves beyond prescriptive “how-to” guides by illuminating the subtle organizational and psychological conditions that underpin successful hackathons. By framing hackathons as social experiments rather than linear pipelines, Rys offers practical insight into cultivating environments that balance pressure with play, diversity with coherence, and ambition with learning. His emphasis on mentoring, narrative framing, and evaluation design provides concrete principles for practitioners striving to maximize both creative and developmental outcomes.
For policymakers, the book underscores the potential of hackathons as participatory instruments in public-sector innovation. Civic hackathons, in particular, emerge as platforms for mobilizing distributed expertise around complex social challenges – from urban mobility to digital inclusion. Rys demonstrates how hackathons can function as boundary-spanning events that connect government, academia, and civil society, aligning with the “Triple Helix” logic of collaborative innovation. He also warns, however, that without structural follow-up and inclusion mechanisms, such initiatives risk reproducing technological optimism without societal transformation. This cautionary note is particularly relevant in an era where policy discourses often fetishize speed and novelty.
The book’s distinctive contribution lies in bridging theory and praxis. Its hybrid tone – analytical yet accessible, critical yet constructive – makes it a resource that can circulate across academic, professional, and civic settings. Rys’s insistence on examining both the promise and the paradoxes of hackathons enriches the debate on how institutions orchestrate creativity in the twenty-first century.
Sparks for Innovation, theefore, provides a versatile foundation for future inquiry and practice. It equips scholars with conceptual clarity, practitioners with actionable insight, and policymakers with an evidence-based understanding of participatory innovation. Each of these audiences can find in Rys’s book not merely a description of the hackathon phenomenon but a framework for reimagining how collective creativity is organized and sustained.
CONCLUSION
Rys’s Sparks for Innovation transforms a transient organizational trend into a substantive object of academic reflection. By combining theoretical synthesis, ethnographic sensitivity, and practitioner insight, the book captures hackathons not as managerial curiosities but as cultural prototypes of how creativity is organized in contemporary society.
Its imperfections – occasional fragmentation, uneven integration of theory and narrative – are inseparable from its ambition to encompass a multifaceted and fast-evolving field. These very tensions make the book a productive contribution to ongoing debates on innovation, collaboration, and learning.
Beyond its empirical and conceptual contributions, Rys’s work performs a meta-function: it invites both scholars and practitioners to rethink the institutional conditions under which innovation and research themselves take place. In this sense, Sparks for Innovation is not only a study of hackathons but also a call to hack the processes of knowledge creation.
As such, the book should find a lasting place in the interdisciplinary literature on innovation and entrepreneurship – offering scholars theoretical grounding, practitioners reflective insight, and policymakers an example of how experimentation can be institutionalized without losing its creative edge.
References
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Biographical notes
Joanna Pousset (Ph.D., Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) is Professor of Social Influence, Entrepreneurship and Finance at TBS Business School. She has also taught at Universitat de les Illes Balears and EADA Business School, and is a startup mentor and coach with Demium and Impactivs. She has published in Society and Business Review and Research Handbook on Boards of Directors. Joanna is passionate about entrepreneurship, and has lead an innovative initiative fostering collaborations between business academics and startup founders at Future Finance Fest (3f), where she is co-chair.
David Stolin (Ph.D., London Business School) is Professor of Finance at TBS Business School. He has published in leading business and finance journals, such as Journal of Business, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and Management Science. His research interests include investment management, corporate governance, business education, fintech, and innovation more generally. For his work on innovation in teaching and research outreach, David has received awards from the Academy of Management, QS-Wharton’s Reimagine Education, Financial Management Association, and European Economic Association, among others.
Citation (APA Style)
Pousset, J., & Stolin, D. (2025). Hackathons as engines of innovation: A review essay. Journal of Entrepreneurship, Management and Innovation, 21(4), 152-158. https://doi.org/10.7341/20252147
Received 16 October 2025; Accepted 17 October 2025.
This is an open-access paper under the CC BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode).