The innovation journey of new product development processes often spans weeks or months. Recently, though, hackathons have turned the journey into an ad hoc sprint of only a couple of days using new tools and technologies. Existing research predicts that such conditions will result in a failure to produce new working products, yet hackathons often lead to functioning innovative products. To investigate this puzzle, we closely studied the product development process of 13 comparable projects in assistive technology hackathons. We found that accelerating innovation created temporal ambiguity, as it was unclear how to coordinate the challenging work within such an extremely limited and ad hoc time frame. Multiple projects worked to reduce this ambiguity, importing temporal structures from organizational innovation processes and compressing them to fit the extremely limited and ad hoc time frame. They worked in full coordination to build a new product. They all failed. Only projects that sustained the temporal ambiguity—by working with a minimal basis for coordination and allowing new temporal structures to emerge—were able to produce functioning new products under the intense time pressure. This study contributes to theories on innovation processes, coordination, and temporality.

中文翻译：

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最小化和自适应协调：黑客马拉松的项目如何在不扼杀创新的情况下加速创新

新产品开发流程的创新之旅通常需要数周或数月。然而，最近，黑客马拉松已经将旅程变成了使用新工具和技术的仅几天的临时冲刺。现有研究预测，这种情况将导致无法生产新的工作产品，但黑客马拉松通常会导致创新产品发挥作用。为了研究这个难题，我们仔细研究了辅助技术黑客马拉松中 13 个可比项目的产品开发过程。我们发现加速创新会造成时间上的模糊，因为不清楚如何在如此极其有限和临时的时间范围内协调具有挑战性的工作。多个项目致力于减少这种歧义，从组织创新过程中导入时间结构并压缩它们以适应极其有限和临时的时间框架。他们通力合作，打造了一款新产品。他们都失败了。只有那些维持时间模糊性的项目——通过以最小的协调基础工作并允许出现新的时间结构——才能在巨大的时间压力下生产出功能齐全的新产品。这项研究有助于创新过程、协调和时间的理论。只有那些维持时间模糊性的项目——通过以最小的协调基础工作并允许出现新的时间结构——才能在巨大的时间压力下生产出功能齐全的新产品。这项研究有助于创新过程、协调和时间的理论。只有那些维持时间模糊性的项目——通过以最小的协调基础工作并允许出现新的时间结构——才能在巨大的时间压力下生产出功能齐全的新产品。这项研究有助于创新过程、协调和时间的理论。