Avoid These Five Pitfalls at Your Next Hackathon
Defining crystal-clear objectives and planning carefully before you launch an open problem-solving challenge will increase the likelihood of coming away with useful results.
Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Getty Images
A successful hackathon comes together as a burst of creative energy and spontaneous problem-solving — but behind it is solid planning and months of hard work to get the challenge and the details locked down. Failure to define a challenge that is meaningful to the sponsor and appropriate to solve within the set time limit is one of five problems that can doom a hackathon, wasting time and resources. The article is adapted from Sparks for Innovation (Columbia University Press, 2025).
Hackathons are a valuable tool for spurring innovative solutions to challenging problems, but they can fail badly. This can be particularly disheartening considering the substantial time, money, and other resources invested in preparation, organization, and execution. So, what causes them to go wrong?
In my research, I observed 48 distinct hackathons from five different perspectives: participant, mentor, organizer, observer, and adviser. The most significant overarching problem is that organizers don’t establish well-defined goals from the start. Among hackathons I studied, only a minority had well-defined objectives, capabilities, and methodologies for assessing the event’s success, along with a concrete execution plan.
The lessons that follow can help organizers of future hackathons steer clear of common mistakes.
1. Define a challenge that meets the needs of both organizers and participants. Incorrectly prepared, unclear, uninteresting, or impossible-to-solve challenges are among the most common reasons that hackathons fail. One HackYeah event included a challenge from an organization aiming to create a new, safer registration service for its product. The IT team prepared technical requirements and defined the challenge, but later the marketing department added more requirements, rendering the task unsolvable within the given hackathon time. The IT team discovered these amendments only at the beginning of the hackathon when the challenge details were released to the public. Of more than 2,000 participants and hundreds of teams, no one decided to take on this challenge, even though the prize was attractive, with a greater financial reward than in other challenges.
Challenges are the core around which everything else is later built, so they should be clearly defined before any other planning takes place. In the process, check that time constraints are realistic via a test run within the organization or by seeking advice from more experienced organizers.
2. Mentoring is poorly managed, inadequate, or absent. Participants usually need mentoring for issues that stall their progress with the challenge. In some hackathons, teams complained that mentors gave them bad advice that derailed the team’s progress and diverged from their initial good ideas. In another case, the organizing company decided that mentors would not be necessary for a few hours overnight.