Elliott Masie explains tech culture’s answer to the marathon: the hackathon. More companies than ever are hosting these types of events because they consistently produce positive results.

Elliott Masie:  I’m a hacker and I love Hackathons.  Now hacking doesn’t mean about breaking in to something illegally.  What it really means is how do you with a group of people break through and find a creative solution?  So Hackathons are a way in which you can, for instance in a corporation, ask for and get ten volunteers from different roles who are committed to spending an intense amount of time.  In some companies it might be a weekend with pizza and to try to in a real experimental lab time come up with a unique solution.  Right now some of the leading medical device companies like Boston Scientific are using Hackathons as ways of saying what’s an out of the box approach to solving a problem that traditional research never got us to.  We believe that Hackathons are part of tapping the wisdom of the crowd and increasingly we’re going to see Hackathons that aren’t about physically getting into a room together but are, in fact, diverse and distributed around the world linked by technology.

Directed/Produced by Jonathan Fowler, Elizabeth Rodd, and Dillon Fitton