Competing to solve a problem is the fastest way to solve it. Where Hackathons came from, what people have built at one, and why you do not need to write a line of code to take part.
Flash Summary
A Hackathon has a fixed window, a real problem, a mixed team, and something working at the end. It can run 4 hours or two days. The concept turns 27 this year, and it has produced a pharmacy Amazon bought for around $753 million and a delivery app, built in 48 hours, that kept Dutch bakers trading through lockdown.
What's a Hackathon?
You have probably seen the photos: pizza boxes and hoodies. There is a lot more to it than that.
A Hackathon is a time-boxed event where mixed teams take a real problem and build something that works before the clock runs out. Two days is the classic shape, but it scales down well. An express Hackathon runs 3 or 4 hours and still produces a decision and something rough you can look at.
The name joins "hack" and "marathon", and the first half scares people. A hack here has nothing to do with breaking into systems. That meaning came later. The original was coined at MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club, first written down in the club minutes of 5 April 1955, and it meant an inventive fix made with whatever was to hand. Going around the obstacle instead of through it. Duct tape and a good idea.
So a Hackathon is an ingenious marathon: clever problem-solving against a clock, aimed at something real.
A time-window that cannot move
Hours to 2 days, fixed before anyone signs up.
A brief from the problem owner
From someone who suffers it, with real evidence.
4 or 5 disciplines
Across functions and, ideally, companies.
The output: something that works
It has to run in front of a room.
The clock adds the adrenaline, and does the hard part. A steering committee can defer a decision, so it usually does. A team with six hours left cannot.
Where it started
June 1999. The developers behind OpenBSD were scattered across countries and needed to build strong encryption into their operating system together. US export rules treated cryptography as a weapon, so they rented a house in Calgary for a week. Either Theo de Raadt or Niels Provos had already put "hack" and "marathon" together. By the end of the week they had the first IPv6 and IPSEC stacks fully integrated into an OS. OpenBSD has run them ever since.
- 1999Calgary. Ten developers, one week, an industry first
- 2012PillPack wins MIT Hacking Medicine
- 2020Hack the Crisis NL. 831 people in 48 hours
- 2021VIGC Flanders. Opinry wins, its founder resigns
- 2025NASA Space Apps. 114,000 people in one weekend
A company built over a weekend
In 2012 a second-generation pharmacist, TJ Parker, walked into MIT Hacking Medicine and met Elliot Cohen, an engineer. They spent the weekend on a problem Parker had watched from behind his father's counter.
Five bottles, twice a day
Two or three long-term conditions and you leave the pharmacy with five bottles. Different pills, different times. Every morning starts with sorting them at the kitchen table. Miss one and the condition quietly gets worse.
One pack per moment
Change the unit. A roll of sealed packs, one per date and time, printed with what is inside. Tuesday 8am is a single tear. The pharmacy chases the refills.
A pharmacy rebuilt in 48 hours
Sketched at MIT Hacking Medicine in 2012. Won. Founded the next year, shipping from one pharmacy in New Hampshire.
Amazon's pharmacy business
Amazon bought it in 2018. Still PillPack by Amazon Pharmacy, open to Medicare since 2025. The people holding five bottles.
No new drug, no new device. A different unit of packaging, worked out by two people who met that morning. Bloomberg traced the arc to a line on Amazon's balance sheet.
A country hacks its own crisis
March 2020. Estonia declared an emergency and ran a two-day online Hackathon instead of convening a task force. Two weeks later TNW pulled Hack the Crisis NL together in days.
Our founder was on Roodkappje, the team that won the SME track: an app connecting bakers and greengrocers, whose customers had vanished overnight, with volunteers ready to deliver for them. Business continuity for Dutch SMEs, built in one weekend by people who had never met.
Hacks in print and packaging
VIGC, the Flemish innovation centre for graphic communication, ran a graphic arts Hackathon two years running. October 2020, 84 people, 13 teams. Smiles won, from Luca School of Arts students in Ghent: smile detection on a phone, gathering the moments that made you laugh into a printed book. An answer to "print is finished" you can hold.
October 2021, 100 people in 12 teams. Opinry won, led by Julie Dumoulin: A/B testing for packaging, AI and consumer panels judging a design before anyone cuts a plate. She took the €2,000 prize and resigned from her job that week. She now co-founds Spotable in Ghent, automating quoting for roof and façade renovation, €1.2m raised.
Who still runs Hackathons, and why
ABN AMRO ran Beyond Banking Days, opening its data and APIs to outside developers. The best result had nothing to do with banking: a team on childhood cancer data found the gene pool that predicts which leukaemia treatments work. Princess Máxima hired a researcher to validate it.
Nestlé does both sizes. Its two-day Open Innovation Hackathon in Sri Lanka drew 200 entries, one winning team tackling its own packaging waste. Opened to all 20,000 people at Nestlé USA, it returns close to $200 million.
IKEA ran a decade of hackathons out of SPACE10 in Copenhagen, where IKEA Place was born. The lab closed in 2023, innovation having become embedded in the company. And NASA runs the biggest: 167 countries, 11,500 projects in a weekend, open to anyone.
Propelling innovation
What do those stories have in common? A leukaemia model, a delivery app for greengrocers, a printed book of smiles. On the Friday, none was anybody's job.
Every company carries a list like that: problems between departments, belonging to nobody. Fixing one takes four or five people who do not report to each other, in a room, with the real numbers. Booking that room is where it dies, so the problem gets parked, unparked at the offsite, parked again.
A Hackathon books the room, then adds the part people underestimate. Several teams work the same brief to beat each other, nobody polishes a bad idea for weeks, and when the clock stops you have six answers to compare instead of one to approve.
Collective and competitive sound like opposites. In a two-day format they are the same mechanism. The competition sets the pace. The collaboration decides the quality.
The formats, and which one you want
| Format | Length | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Express hack | 3 to 4 hours | A decision and a rough prototype |
| Internal hack | 1 to 2 days | Problems your people already knew about, solved |
| Value-chain hack | 4 to 48 hours | Open innovation with a deadline, across companies |
| Public or civic hack | A weekend | Volume and range, from anyone who registers |
| Hackathon in a box | Run it yourself | Your team, your brief, no travel. Our Hack Pack™ |
Do you need to code?
No. The teams that win are usually the ones where most people cannot. Most of the win comes from understanding and quantifying the problem before anyone builds.
It looks like an engineering event and behaves like a decision-making one. Very little of the time goes on typing. The rest goes on working out the real problem and choosing the one piece you can prove by the deadline.
Four of these five never open a code editor.
This is what has changed since 1999. Back then the build was the bottleneck, so the room filled with engineers. Now one engineer with the right AI tooling has a prototype in hours. The scarce thing has moved: judgement about which problem to point it at, and that sits with the people who do the work.
Want to run one, or be in one?
We design and facilitate AI Hackathons, from a 4-hour express format to two full days, on your problem and your data, with our engineers in the teams so nobody needs to code. The Hack Pack™ carries the structure: briefs, timings, cards, videos. Or take it on its own and run the day yourself.
Ours works that way. H/Pack for 2030 is a one-day express Hackathon in Amsterdam on 29 October, run on the Hack Pack. If you would rather be in a team than run one, seats are open.
We love problems. Let's hack them.