[kypro]

I've developed the somewhat controversial opinion that anything that can be conceived and built in a day is almost never worth doing. What I've seen work better is companies setting aside some team resource (maybe 10%) for innovation projects.

Specifically instead of running hackathons just give a team a very open ended business problem and ask them to investigate how they can use tech to improve or solve the problem. Give the team a month for an initial investigation and if they come up with something interesting provide them time to develop a POC.

Hackathons in my experience just end up with people rushing into mostly useless POCs because they neither have adequate time to investigate a problem or the time to actually build something interesting. You'll generally just get devs building things that already exist with whatever the new hot tech stack is at the time.

I'll also add that corporates generally do these things because a management consultant like McKinsey told them it's a good idea. It's the same reason why agile is so poorly implemented in corporations because they have no real care or understanding of it, they're just implementing the guidance given to them to the letter.

[JohnFen]

> I've developed the somewhat controversial opinion that anything that can be conceived and built in a day is almost never worth doing.

I've started several successful businesses based on an idea that I conceived and built (to MVP) in a single day. I actually consider that one of the keys to my success.