Here's what leading companies are getting from their internal hackathon programs.
The question that comes up before most internal hackathons—from leadership, from skeptical colleagues, or in your own planning—is some version of: will this actually produce anything meaningful? We’re digging into the results from the hackathon programs we support at Grafana Labs, Okta, JLL, and others, to show what you can expect.
Here's what this post covers:
For context: organizations across industries are under increasing pressure to move from AI investment to AI implementation. Most have the tools. Fewer have figured out how to get those tools into active use across the enterprise. Internal hackathons are one of the more efficient ways to close that gap, and the outcomes below show how.
Yes, and it might be a lot more than you think. Here's what a well-run hackathon program produces.
If you want a data point on the long-term value of hackathon projects beyond the event, Grafana Labs is a great example. The open-source software company has run over 13 company-wide internal hackathons for several years—and has scaled the program from three to four events per year since using Devpost for Teams.
Across those hackathons, approximately 35–40% of submitted projects have either shipped or made it onto the product roadmap.
"Over a quarter of our hackathon projects have shipped, and there is another 10–15% that have made their way onto the roadmap." — Juan Ruszem, Global Internal Events Manager, Grafana Labs
When a third to nearly half of all projects submitted during a company-wide hackathon go directly into the product pipeline, that’s an undeniable impact.
This matters a lot right now. Most enterprises aren't short on AI tools or intention—they're short on working AI implementations. An internal hackathon compresses the distance between experiment and execution. Participants build something real with AI tools in a matter of days.
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While many internal hackathon participants are engineers and developers, companies also run these events at scale across their entire organization. That broader participation turns out to be one of the more valuable outcomes.
Janet Carmody, Head of Culture at Motorola Solutions, described how her company approaches this.
"Between the hackers, the participants, the judges, and voting, we had 11,000 people participate in our hackathon.” — Janet Carmody, Motorola Solutions
"We made sure that everybody had a chance to be a part of it, regardless of what their job or skillset was," she said.
When Okta shifted to a purpose-built hackathon platform for its internal events, it saw:
"Having an inclusive hack culture is top of mind for us," said Neta Retter, Director of Innovation Programs at Okta. When Okta made AI a central theme for one of its hackathons—creating a secure environment for participants to experiment with generative AI—over 25% of submitted projects were AI-related, with participation coming from across the organization, not just technical teams.
JLL, a global real estate services company with over 65,000 employees, saw a 52.3% year-over-year increase in hackathon participation and an 82.4% project submission rate among registered participants.
Tony Hernandez, Chief Architect at JLL Technologies, described how his team has worked to expand who shows up: "Most recently, we've been trying to bring in more of our business partners into this hackathon world and drive collaboration across more than just engineering teams."
For many companies, the goal is to learn what's possible with AI and start integrating those tools into existing workflows. When participation is broad, that learning spreads across the organization, not just within technical teams.
Internal hackathons give teams the chance to dedicate time to building with AI tools, and that hands-on experience is often the fastest way to develop real capability.
Okta set up one of its hackathons specifically to give participants secure access to generative AI tools, working with OpenAI to create the right guardrails.
"Hackathons are generally critical for experimentation because you are able to set up guardrails and do things that you can't otherwise do in your core work. In this specific case, we were able to do that around AI." — Neta Retter, Director of Innovation Programs, Okta
JLL organized one of its internal hackathons around generative AI as its central theme. "Hackathons are a way of learning new skills, and one hackathon was all focused on GenAI," said Tony Hernandez, Chief Architect at JLL Technologies. "GenAI was very new for a lot of folks and it was a great way for people to get firsthand experience of playing with this new technology and seeing the art of the possible."
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What you put in place after the event determines whether strong outcomes compound over time—or stop at a single result.
At Toyota North America, a project from the company's first internal hackathon made it all the way to production:
"Toyota was able to announce a new feature in one of our vehicles that was the winner of our first-ever hackathon." — Trey Spyropoulos, Manager of Communications and Organizational Effectiveness at Toyota North America
"So this is something that you can tangibly see that your work produces an end result."
Valenz Health’s hackathons have produced a growing catalog of submitted ideas that the team treats as an ongoing asset.
"The cataloging piece is really helpful. From a business perspective, if we didn't have that, it would be hard to keep the momentum going." — David Green, VP of Innovation, Valenz Health
At Finastra, a global fintech company with a long history of running internal hackathons, one event produced seven or eight projects that went directly to the product roadmap. "That was a really great achievement," said Chirine Ben Zaied, Head of Innovation at Finastra.
The range of results across programs isn't random. A few things consistently show up in programs with stronger output:
1. How you scope the challenge
Specific, AI-focused challenge prompts tend to produce more focused, implementable submissions than open-ended ones. Grafana Labs runs each hackathon around two themes—one general and one more defined, such as artificial intelligence—to give participants both flexibility and a clear direction.
"Having two themes ensures that there is a wide variety of submissions and that participants get an option in how they want to tackle what they work on for the hackathon," said Juan. That structure gives teams creative room while pointing them toward the problems the organization most wants solved.
2. How accessible the experience is for participants and judges
Submission quality and participation both tend to go up when the platform removes friction instead of adding it. Stitching together wikis, spreadsheets, and forms pulls participants' attention away from building and toward logistics.
It also makes reviewing projects harder—and judging is often the one phase of the hackathon where senior leaders are directly involved, which means it's the area where making things seamless matters most. For a closer look at what that involves, see how Devpost for Teams streamlines hackathon judging.
3. What you put in place after the event ends
Projects that get cataloged, reviewed by leadership, and connected to a path forward have a real chance of shipping. Those that get left in a shared folder after the event tend to stall.
Building post-event continuity into your plan from the start is a clear difference between programs with compounding output and those with a single strong result.
The outcomes above—projects shipping, AI skills building across teams, innovation catalogs that compound over time—represent what's possible. Which of those matters most depends on your organization's goals, your team's makeup, and how you structure the event.
If you'd like to talk through what success looks like for your specific program, our team works alongside organizers to help figure that out—book a free consultation here.
