Hackathons are virtual or in-person events where employees and outside participants collaborate to address a specific priority.
Hackathon software helps companies manage all aspects of the event in one tool, including registration, team formation, ideation, evaluation, and validation.
This reduces the logistical burden by eliminating the need to switch between messaging apps, spreadsheets, scheduling tools, and event management software.
As innovation managers who have run hundreds of remote hackathons in our careers, we’ve learned that there are five features all hackathon software must have:
Hackathon software should include an AI co-pilot, trained on the most successful hackathon challenge postings, to guide managers in crafting high-quality challenges. This improves the quality of ideas by ensuring hackathon managers include all the necessary information in their postings.
Hackathon software should identify when participants are about to submit an idea similar to someone else's. It must offer the option to automatically filter these ideas by prompting participants to co-create with the original author. This prevents evaluators from having to filter through duplicate ideas.
Hackathon software should provide a network of outside experts that can be used to source ideas. This is necessary because many companies don’t have the internal competencies to solve the hackathon.
Hackathon software should make ideas accessible to all employees and encourage collaboration. This allows various competencies (programmers, marketers, accountants, lawyers, etc.) to critique ideas and ensure they’re in the best possible condition before evaluation.
Hackathon software should offer comprehensive workflows guiding participants through idea evaluation and validation. This enables companies to identify the best ideas and test their impact, customer demand, and feasibility with a small budget before spending resources on the full-scale launch.
Many software options are available for companies to create and manage hackathons. However, we’ve learned that most don’t tick all the boxes mentioned above.
Some hackathon software excels in ideation but lacks the workflows to validate ideas and develop ideas into practical solutions. Others have comprehensive workflows but don’t support cross-departmental collaboration.
So, we wrote this article covering the five best hackathon software.
We start by discussing our innovation platform, InnovationCast, and how we guide hackathon managers to collect high-quality ideas and transform them into beneficial solutions.
Companies like DHL, Visa, Novo Nordisk, and more have used InnovationCast to launch successful hackathons. Schedule a free demo to learn more about our process.
1. InnovationCast
Innovation management software that helps companies collect, evaluate, validate, and implement high-quality ideas
InnovationCast is all-in-one innovation management software that helps companies manage hackathons from start to finish:
Idea collection: We offer an idea-collection feature called Innovation Challenges, enabling hackathon managers to educate participants on their priorities and request ideas. We also improve the quality of ideas using our AI co-pilot, duplicate checker, and templates (more on this below).
Idea improvement: We present ideas on the InnovationCast interface, allowing other users to explore them. Users are encouraged to vote on ideas and join the original author to improve them.
Idea evaluation and validation: We have workflows that assist users on idea evaluation and validation. This typically includes evaluation criteria and scoring systems to employ, experiments to test an idea’s demand and impact, and competencies to include.
Impact tracking: Hackathon managers can use our reporting dashboard to measure participation rates. They can track the number of ideas submitted, evaluated, validated, and more. They can also measure KPIs like sales, revenue generated, and customer churn.
Additionally, we discuss innovation strategy to clarify your objectives during onboarding. Then, we help plan the hackathon, set up the event with all supporting information inside InnovationCast, register users and teams, and create workflows for evaluating, validating, and implementing ideas.
We set everything up so you can start collecting ideas immediately — no need to start from scratch.
How InnovationCast Helps Companies Educate Participants on Their Priorities and Collect High-Quality Ideas
Hackathon managers can create challenge postings that contain context around their priority, including pre-recorded kickoff videos, live streams, Q&A sessions, market research data, hackathon rules, and more.
Hackathon managers can then add deadlines for when participants must submit their ideas, encouraging quick engagement.
InnovationCast notifies all relevant participants via email, intranet, or the company’s messaging app to review the hackathon challenge posting and respond with ideas or proof of concepts.
Read more: How to Implement an Effective Idea Generation Process in Your Organization
AI Co-Pilot to Improve the Quality of Hackathon Postings and Idea Submissions
Our AI co-pilot reads the contents of your hackathon postings and suggests improvements. This AI co-pilot is trained on data from the best-performing hackathon postings launched by our clients and team. It may suggest improvements like:
Focus the hackathon on specific topics and outcomes
Clearly communicate rewards to participants
List the criteria used to evaluate ideas
Set clear rules and expectations for the types of ideas that are allowed
Explain the potential impact of the hackathon on the company’s bottom line
Add a video or quote from the sponsors to improve engagement
This ensures hackathon managers add enough detail for participants to understand the priority and submit high-quality ideas while not overwhelming them with too much information.
Our AI co-pilot analyzes hackathon submissions and provides targeted feedback to improve each entry. It identifies potential blindspots and helps participants strengthen their value propositions, resulting in higher-quality solutions for hackathon managers to evaluate.
Comprehensive Hackathon Templates
InnovationCast differentiates itself from most software with templates, checklists, examples, webinars, and case studies guiding hackathon managers through information to add to the hackathon challenge posting, depending on the ideas needed.
This guidance is based on our decade-plus of experience as innovation managers.
In addition, we have visual themes built into InnovationCast that you can use to create beautiful hackathon postings that align with your branding or sponsor logos. We can design one during onboarding if none of our themes match your brand. Creating a webpage from scratch or using generic Google Form designs to host hackathons is not the way forward.
Access to Thousands of Outside Experts
Leveraging our partnership with HeroX, hackathon managers can invite outside experts such as researchers, universities, students, and startups to review the material inside the hackathon posting, submit ideas, co-create with team members, and lend their time to idea evaluation and validation.
This easy access to thousands of outside experts enables companies to tap into a broader range of competencies and perspectives that they wouldn’t be able to if they restricted participation to just employees.
Read more: 5 Best Open Innovation Software (with Reviews)
Duplicate Checker to Filter Out Similar Ideas
Our duplicate checker interprets a participant’s response and compares it to ideas that have already been submitted. If a respondent submits an idea that overlaps with someone else's, it encourages them to review the original idea and partner with the author to refine it.
This has two benefits:
No duplicate ideas: Hackathon managers don’t have to filter potentially similar ideas.
Organic team formation: Teams are formed organically by getting respondents to co-create with the original author. Participants with expertise in different areas can collaborate to refine ideas.
How InnovationCast Improves Ideas by Combining Everyone’s Expertise
InnovationCast displays ideas on the user interface where they're visible to everyone upon signing in.
Participants are encouraged to examine each other's ideas, highlight potential weaknesses and considerations, and vote on their thoughts.
However, unlike other hackathon software that stops after voting and uses that to gauge an idea's quality, InnovationCast requires users to give feedback to the original author. Users can then team up and learn from each other's approaches, designs, and technical implementations.
This emphasis on co-creation improves ideas using the expertise and brainpower of the whole workforce. Employees working in product, marketing, finance, data science, IT, and more can all analyze ideas and make improvements.
For example, the legal department can bring compliance considerations to light, and marketing can provide feedback on how well the idea resonates with target audiences.
Companies can also set timelines and deadlines for when all co-creation must stop, and ideas get sent for evaluation. This creates the urgency to improve the idea quickly.
Read more: How to Create a Collaborative Innovation Process and Network
InnovationCast Helps Companies Evaluate, Validate & Implement Ideas
A common mistake we see companies make when running hackathons is that they don’t establish the steps to evaluate, validate, and implement ideas, causing them to stall.
To address this, we designed InnovationCast with workflows that act as step-by-step guides detailing the tasks, stages, experiments, and competencies required to move ideas into implementation.
InnovationCast workflows typically consist of two stages:
Idea evaluation: Our workflows contain evaluation models, scoring systems, and criteria that help evaluators surface the best ideas.
Idea validation: We provide guidance on validating an idea’s impact and demand, tracking relevant metrics, involving the right competencies, and allocating resources effectively. Validation is key to avoiding wasted resources on a product launch without demand.
As tasks are completed and ideas pass through the workflow, InnovationCast notifies the person responsible for the next task that their input is needed, ensuring validation projects are delivered on time and that ideas don’t collect dust.
What distinguishes InnovationCast from other hackathon software is that we have workflows for different kinds of ideas including service ideas, new product ideas, process ideas, continuous improvement ideas, business model ideas, and more. Hackathon managers aren’t stuck with a generic workflow.
We’ll set up these hackathon workflows during onboarding and tailor them around your processes. However, you can easily customize them with our no-code editor. You don’t need to be a programmer.
Side note: InnovationCast has integrations with GitHub, GitLab, Devpost, Bitbucket, and other platforms, helping software developers manage version control, share code, and collaborate on development.
Read more: Idea Validation: A Guide to Affordably Testing Ideas
How InnovationCast Helps Companies Track the Progress of the Hackathon Event
Companies can keep tabs on their hackathons’ performance inside the InnovationCast reporting dashboard. They can view metrics such as:
Ideas submitted
Ideas currently in evaluation
Ideas selected for validation
Ideas selected for implementation
Live prototypes
Project submissions
Votes and comments
Companies can also track the projects currently being validated or implemented, the teams in charge of them, deadlines, and potential roadblocks.
When ideas are implemented, companies can import data from tools like Google Charts, Tableau, or Microsoft Power BI to view sales figures, new active uses, customer churn, most used features, and more.
Read more: How to Measure Innovation: Essential KPIs & Best Practices
InnovationCast Supports Employee Recognition and Rewards
Companies can use InnovationCast’s badges and rewards program to recognize and reward hackathon winners, runners-up, and those who played an important role in idea improvement, evaluation, and validation.
Companies can reward participants in three ways:
Monetary rewards: Hackathon managers can reward participants with cash prizes, gift cards, PTO, movie tickets, iPhones and iPads, allowances, or anything else. Some of our clients have even rewarded hackathon winners with cars for addressing problems that really made a difference.
Non-monetary rewards: Hackathon managers can also reward participants with career advancement opportunities, innovation sabbaticals, public recognition, invitations to boot camps, mentorships, and more.
Gamification rewards like leadership boards: Hackathon managers can reward employees with a certain amount of points for each task completed and showcase it on a leaderboard within InnovationCast. This type of gamification reward is powerful as participants are eager to outcompete their colleagues.
Read more: How to Encourage Innovation in the Workplace
What Clients Say About InnovationCast
Here’s what clients say about our innovation management software:
Get Started
InnovationCast has helped companies like DHL, ING, and Vodafone create and manage hackathons that source high-quality ideas and develop them into beneficial products.
Book a 25-minute demo to learn how we can help you set up and manage hackathon processes.
2. Brightidea
Brightidea is enterprise innovation management software designed to manage hackathons and foster innovation through its idea collection and collaboration features.
During onboarding, Brightidea’s customer success team meets with you to learn more about your innovation strategy and hackathon goals. They then customize the platform around these considerations.
Key Features
Program: Hackathon organizers can define problem statements or themes, communicate priorities to participants, and attach relevant documents, research articles, or videos to provide more context. Participants can then brainstorm and submit ideas.
Idea box: Hackathon participants can submit ideas at any stage during the event. Organizers can set predefined categories to ensure submissions align with specific problem areas.
Lab: Hackathon organizers can review all submitted ideas in one place. This central hub enables collaboration across teams and stakeholders, facilitating idea refinement.
Transformation: Project management feature that hackathon organizers can assign tasks, track progress, and assess the feasibility of their solutions.
Ecosystem: Brightidea’s Ecosystem connects organizers, participants, and external stakeholders, such as sponsors or subject matter experts.
Read more: 6 Brightidea Competitors and Alternatives (Review Guide)
3. HYPE Innovation
HYPE Innovation provides comprehensive innovation management software that is adaptable for online hackathons. Organizers and managers can collect, evaluate, and develop ideas within a single platform.
HYPE Innovation’s customer success team will join you on a call during onboarding to help set up the event, register users, and customize the platform around your needs.
Key Features
Challenges: HYPE allows organizers to create challenges around a specific problem. Organizers can attach resources like documents, articles, or videos to each challenge, providing context and inspiring innovative solutions.
Idea submission: Participants can submit ideas through a user-friendly interface, and teams can collaborate to refine their submissions. The platform supports structured idea capture, ensuring submissions include all relevant details.
Collaboration hub: This functionality acts as a centralized platform where participants, mentors, and organizers can collaborate in real-time. Teams can brainstorm, provide feedback, and iterate on ideas, fostering an engaging environment.
Workflow automation: Organizers can automate repetitive tasks, such as sending reminders for deadlines, notifying teams about updates, or advancing ideas to the next stage.
Evaluation: HYPE allows organizers and judges to score ideas based on customizable criteria. This feature simplifies the evaluation process.
Analytics and insights: The platform provides detailed analytics on participation rates, engagement, and idea impact. These insights allow organizers to assess the hackathon's success and identify opportunities for improvement in future events.
4. Eventornado
Eventornado is a specialized hackathon platform designed to simplify the creation and management of different types of hackathons, including both virtual and in-person hackathons. Its feature set is tailored to foster creativity and teamwork among participants, streamline collaboration, and turn ideas into products that benefit the company.
Key Features
Challenge management: Organizers can create problem statements that define the focus areas of the hackathon. These challenges can include detailed descriptions and multimedia attachments to provide participants with the necessary context.
Team formation: Eventornado includes a team-building feature where participants can form or join teams based on shared interests or skill sets.
Submission management: The platform allows participants to submit their projects with ease, supporting a variety of file types and enabling teams to provide detailed documentation of their solutions.
Judging and evaluation: Eventornado offers customizable judging workflows, allowing organizers to define evaluation criteria and assign judges to specific tracks or challenges. Judges can review and score submissions directly on the platform.
Virtual and hybrid support: Eventornado is optimized for virtual and hybrid hackathons, offering features like integrated video conferencing, real-time chat, and project showcase capabilities.
Analytics and reporting: Organizers can access detailed analytics on participant activity, submission progress, and event engagement.
5. Ideanote
Ideanote is an idea management platform well-suited for hackathons, offering features that support idea-collection, assessment, and implementation.
Key Features
Challenges: Hackathon organizers can create challenges or themes to guide participants toward solving specific problems. These challenge posts can include detailed descriptions and supporting materials.
Engage: Organizers can use Ideanote to engage participants, mentors, and even external stakeholders by sending personalized email notifications or reminders. This helps maintain momentum during the hackathon and ensures participants stay informed about updates.
Manage: All submissions are visible in one central location, making it easy for organizers, mentors, and judges to review and collaborate on ideas.
Measure: Using Ideanote’s analytics tools, organizers can track the progress and success of hackathon projects. Metrics such as submission rates, engagement levels, and participant satisfaction provide valuable insights into the event’s impact.
Automate: Organizers can create automated workflows and notifications for key moments, such as welcoming new participants or reminding teams about deadlines.
Create and Manage Hackathons with InnovationCast
Schedule a 25-minute demo with our customer success team to learn more about how InnovationCast can help manage corporate hackathons.
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