Hackathon formats have been praised for their potential for promoting innovative thinking and making in a short time-frame. For this reason, hackathons have also been embraced by many researchers who use hackathons as part of their research in various ways.

Through an extensive review of 381 publications published during a 10 year time span, we document the multiple ways in which hackathons are embraced and used by researchers The paper contributes to a better understanding of hackathons as part of research by providing a broad overview as a resource for researchers.

We identify three main motivations for using hackathons as part of research: 1) Structuring learning, 2) structuring processes, and 3) enabling participation. For each of the motivations, we identify research with hackathons, and research on hackathons as two main categories. Drawing on several examples from the review we discuss benefits and challenges of using hackathons as part of research.

Jeanette Falk Olesen and Kim Halskov. 2020. 10 Years of Research With and On Hackathons. Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1073–1088. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3357236.3395543

Science hackathons can help academics, particularly those in the early stage of their careers, to build collaborations and write research proposals.

Early career researchers reside in a high-pressure environment. In addition to publishing high-quality papers, applicants for widely-coveted fellowship and lectureship positions have to show clear indications of independent research, collaborations and leadership skills. Demonstrating this is not an easy task, particularly since most early career researchers are paid to work on supervised research projects, which hinders them from becoming truly independent and assuming leadership roles.

For the purpose of aiding this transition between postdoc and fully independent researcher, we introduce the concept of a science hackathon.

These events offer early career researchers the opportunity to be exposed to new scientific research questions, to explore how their own ideas might fit into the larger research landscape, and to develop their own research agenda. We discuss the merits and challenges, based on our own experiences of organizing a series of science hackathons.

Groen, D., & Calderhead, B. (2015). Science hackathons for developing interdisciplinary research and collaborations. eLife, 4, e09944. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.09944

Until recently, developing health technologies was time-consuming and expensive, and often involved patients, doctors, and other health care professionals only as passive recipients of the end product.

So far, users have been minimally involved in the ideation and creation stages of digital health technologies. In order to best address users’ unmet needs, a transdisciplinary and user-led approach, involving cocreation and direct user feedback, is required.

In this context, hackathon events have become increasingly popular in generating enthusiasm for user-centered innovation.

Poncette A, Rojas P, Hofferbert J, Valera Sosa A, Balzer F, Braune K

Hackathons as Stepping Stones in Health Care Innovation: Case Study With Systematic Recommendations

J Med Internet Res 2020;22(3):e17004

URL: https://www.jmir.org/2020/3/e17004

DOI: 10.2196/17004

The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected life worldwide. Governments have been faced with the formidable task of implementing public health measures, such as social distancing, quarantines, and lockdowns, while simultaneously supporting a sluggish economy and stimulating research and development (R&D) for the pandemic. Catalyzing bottom-up entrepreneurship is one method to achieve this. Home-grown efforts by citizens wishing to contribute their time and resources to help have sprouted organically, with ideas shared widely on the internet. We outline a framework for structured, crowdsourced innovation that facilitates collaboration to tackle real, contextualized problems. This is exemplified by a series of virtual hackathon events attracting over 9000 applicants from 142 countries and 49 states.

A hackathon is an event that convenes diverse individuals to crowdsource solutions around a core set of predetermined challenges in a limited amount of time.

A consortium of over 100 partners from across the healthcare spectrum and beyond defined challenges and supported teams after the event, resulting in the continuation of at least 25% of all teams post-event.

Grassroots entrepreneurship can stimulate economic growth while contributing to broader R&D efforts to confront public health emergencies.

Ramadi, K.B., Nguyen, F.T. Rapid crowdsourced innovation for COVID-19 response and economic growth. npj Digit. Med. 4, 18 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-021-00397-5

Expert engineers are fluent at proposing many conceptual ideas early on in their process for solving a design problem.

Beginning engineers are more likely to fixate on one or only a few ideas. Interventions aimed at this stage of the design process could help make it easier for beginning engineers to generate ideas that go beyond their initial ones.

An experimental design tested the impact of three interventions on the ideation process of high school students: (1) Framing, (2) Teams, and (3) Tools. Results suggest that all the interventions had a small positive effect on the number of ideas generated, while only the Tools intervention positively impacted the students’ perception of how easy it was for them to generate ideas.

silk, eli & Daly, Shanna & Jablokow, Kathryn & McKilligan, Seda & Berg, Meisha. (2014). Interventions for ideation: Impact of framing, teaming, and tools on high school students' design fixation.

This chapter outlines a design-led approach to ideation. Ideation is a structured way to develop innovative ideas via collaborative workshops. The chapter starts by contextualising ideation within an overview of the ways in which design supports innovation both as a definable mindset as well as via a standardised methodology.

People, behavioural approaches and methods for design innovation are described in section three. Design Thinking is positioned from this analysis as a practical asset in the innovators’ toolkit and also as a natural inheritor and embodiment of applied creativity.

The chapter concludes by detailing how ideation works in practice and describes an evolved set of techniques, principles and methods for maximising the value of the approach through ideation grids that can be used in face-to-face and remote innovation work.

Knight, J., Ross, E., & Fitton, D. (2021). Using Ideation Grids to Power Collaborative Creativity in Face-to-Face and Remote Innovation Sessions. In (Ed.), Creativity - A Force to Innovation. IntechOpen. https://doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.93850

This paper focuses on emergent signs of evolutionary change in human thinking that run parallel with many of the exponential changes manifesting in the external world. Weak signals are identified from the early 20th century indicating the emergence of new knowledge patterns. These signals have strengthened in the last 40 years. The paper first identifies new ways of thinking within several disciplines such as science, philosophy, religion and education.

New knowledge patterns are then identified in discourses that traverse disciplinary boundaries through transdisciplinary approaches such as futures studies and planetary/global studies.

The paper then discusses evolution of consciousness, identifying research that theorises new ways of thinking as being related to individual psychological development and/or socio-cultural evolution.

Finally, evolutionary concepts are discussed that attempt to meta-cohere the new knowledge patterns via the terms postformal, integral and planetary. Notably, academic research on “futures of thinking,” “evolution of consciousness” and/or “global mindset change” has been, until now, largely ignored by mainstream academic discourse on evolution, consciousness and futures studies.

Gidley, Jennifer. (2010). Globally scanning for “Megatrends of the Mind”: Potential futures of futures thinking. Futures. 42. 1040-1048. 10.1016/j.futures.2010.08.002.

We begin this chapter with the bold claim that it provides a neuroscientific explanation of the magic of creativity. Creativity presents a formidable challenge for neuroscience.

Neuroscientific research generally involves studying what happens in the brain when someone engages in a task that involves responding to a stimulus, or retrieving information from memory and using it the right way or at the right time. If the relevant information is not already encoded in memory, the task generally requires that the individual make systematic use of information that is encoded in memory.

But creativity is different. It paradoxically involves studying how someone pulls out of his or her brain something that was never put into it! Moreover, it must be something both new and useful, or appropriate to the task at hand.

The ability to pull out of memory something new and appropriate that was never stored there in the first place is what we refer to as the magic of creativity. We will see that (like all magic acts) it isn't really magic after all; there is a clever trick behind it.

Gabora, L., & Ranjan, A. (2013). How insight emerges in a distributed, content-addressable memory. In O. Vartanian, A. S. Bristol, & J. C. Kaufman (Eds.), Neuroscience of creativity (pp. 19–43). Boston Review. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262019583.003.0002

This doctorate summarizes 13 years of thinking, experimentation and research into the issue of improving human performance. Specifically, the issue of how to drive

change in human performance, through conversation. This focused on non-clinical populations, and generally with very high functioning people.

My work initially focused on the act of ‘coaching’. At its simplest, coaching is the ability of one person to enable another to improve their performance. Through intensive observation, I built a coaching model that enabled a significant improvement in people’s ability to facilitate behavior change in others. The model was based on the realization that people needed the ‘aha’ moment for change to occur. An effort was made to understand how to best bring others to their own insights. An approach was developed into a set of codified techniques and taught to

thousands of professionals worldwide, including inside large organizations.

Through a desire to understand the deeper mechanisms occurring in moments of insight, I became fascinated with brain research. Initially focused on the neuroscience of insight, I soon became interested in the neuroscience behind other mental experiences central to effective workplace functioning, such as self awareness, social skills, decision-making, and emotional regulation.

Rock, David (2010) The neuroscience of leadership. [Doctorate by Public Works]

Recently, an interest in creativity education has increased globally. Cognitive neuroscience research of creativity has provided possible implications for education, yet few literary reviews that bridge the brain and education studies have been published.

This article first introduces the definitions and behavioral measures of creativity from cognitive neuroscientists’ perspectives and provides a brief overview on the brain regions and neural studies on creativity-related cognitive processes.

Second, the article examines neuroscience studies on the relationship between creativity and intelligence and discusses the nature side of creativity.

Third, a comprehensive review of cognitive neuroscience studies on activities that may trigger new creativity thinking is provided, followed by a discussion on the nurture side of creativity--more specifically--how these findings inform creativity education.

Supportive evidence from research in cognitive psychology and education are also presented. Then the article discusses the policy implications of the findings from the literature review as they pertain to creativity skills development in formal education and training.

Zhou, Kai (2018). What cognitive neuroscience tells us about creativity education: A literature review. Global Education Review, 5 (1), 20-34.

Past research has linked creativity to unusual and unexpected experiences, such as early parental loss or living abroad.

However, few studies have investigated the underlying cognitive processes. We propose that these experiences have in common a “diversifying” aspect and an active involvement, which together enhance cognitive flexibility (i.e., creative cognitive processing).

In the first experiment, participants experienced complex unusual and unexpected events happening in a virtual reality. In the second experiment, participants were confronted with schema-violations.

In both experiments, comparisons with various control groups showed that a diversifying experience – defined as the active (but not vicarious) involvement in an unusual event – increased cognitive flexibility more than active (or vicarious) involvement in normal experiences.

Our findings bridge several lines of research and shed light on a basic cognitive mechanism responsible for creativity.

Ritter, S. M., Damian, R. I., Simonton, D. K., van Baaren, R. B., Strick, M., Derks, J., & Dijksterhuis, A. (2012). Diversifying experiences enhance cognitive flexibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(4), 961–964. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2012.02.009