This article originally appeared on Forbes.

Purpose-driven innovation happens with an unparalleled urgency, focus and determination to find what’s missing. The first 48 hours are especially critical if you want help from your innovation community to unearth ideas for untapped opportunities. Doing so yields benefits like creating a first mover’s advantage or solving tough problems that plague your organization each and every day. If you’re seeking a quick business hack, then hackathons could be your go-to event to spur results in the shortest possible time frame.

As the Future-Fit movement takes shape, organizations understand that the art of relentlessly challenging the status quo is essential. Hackathons, and other time-based and themed innovation activities of this kind, provide a perfect outlet to unleash your employees’ creativity and help it flourish. But a lot of organizations struggle with building positive tension in their pursuit for change.

Hackathons come with their own set of challenges and questions, but before you get started, here’s what you should know to make the most of your efforts.

Break The Routine

Hackathons are in and of themselves a disruption to normal work life that bring your innovation community together to help solve a problem immediately. Unfortunately, standard operating procedures keep larger organizations from engaging in these activities. Worse yet, this makes everyday work feel like groundhog day for many employees. Routines, bureaucracies, processes and systems reign supreme. Sometimes, general feedback is requested, often through surveys, but with no real objective in mind. The status quo is cherished and protected in the name of the supposed greater good.

Hackathons help to break through the daily humdrum by bringing life and soul back into the workplace, stirring up people’s imaginations in a highly collaborative setting gives them a greater sense of purpose and connection to your organization and its mission, and focusing these efforts creates the right sense of urgency that breeds results.

Get Juices Flowing

It’s hard to keep people interested and focused on the same subject for long. When it comes to purpose-driven innovation, the first 48 hours are crucial in motivating solution seekers to find and piece together clues.

As with any crowdsourcing initiative, a premium is placed on the quantity of leads rather than the quality of them. In hackathons, as in any innovation activity for that matter, it’s imperative to start with a bang and ensure the event is launched with lots of focus, positive energy and a sense of fearlessness that gets creative juices flowing and empowers every type of idea to emerge without any form of judgment. The vibe has to be infectious and inclusive early on so that everyone feels like they can speak their mind and share their creativity. These events are truly inspiring as they bring people together from all walks of life, so to speak, to collectively solve the task at hand. This initial rally for ideas is a proven method for discovering novel and innovative ideas for long-standing problem areas.

Frame What’s Missing

Less is more when it comes to defining what solution you’re looking for. The statement must be fairly straightforward and strikingly simple in what information it communicates. The concise nature of the announcement makes it easy for everyone involved, especially those you’re trying to get ideas from.

The single most important element of success in an innovation activity such as a hackathon is how you define what the challenge is and what you’re looking to solve. If you’re new at this and don’t have considerable experience running such events, then the good news is you can always seek professional help to write up a winning problem statement.

Avoid Theater

Hackathons have spread like wildfire in different industries and business areas. The event now takes on different names, forms and durations depending on the business outcome being sought: Innovation Day, Innovation Jam, Discovery Session, Idea Rally, Shark Tank Business Competition and Confidential Challenges are just a few examples of similar innovation activities.

These events aren’t exclusive to programming challenges, and they’re no longer limited to physical audiences. Don’t go MIA and think hackathons are one-and-done, though. Unless you have a broader strategy and well-thought-out plan, then the perception will be that you’re just engaging in innovation theater.

Take control of your future by engaging your community (employees, customers, partners, startups, academia and government) with ongoing hackathon-type events. Create an innovation calendar of events that includes these focused campaigns that stimulate creativity within your ecosystem. This demonstrates a true commitment to innovation.

Make a Mad Dash to the Future

Set up a task force with a fast and furious focus on clues, clues and more clues from as many relevant sources as possible. But every minute counts: The task force should quickly shift its attention to evaluate these clues and decide which ones to pursue. These ideas represent an organization’s innovation funnel. It’s imperative to keep a healthy pipeline, but you need to advance these ideas and make them actionable so that they can ultimately create value and be worth the effort to scale and commercialize. A sustainable engine that makes use of employee creativity is a neverending exercise that gets to the bottom of things, one sprint at a time.

Command Your Crystal Ball

Hackathons create the right focus, definition, description, frequency, length, metrics and outcomes to ensure you’re achieving your objectives and creating positive momentum with meaningful results. Challenge your organization to push the envelope and determine your future before your competition does it for you.



Ludwig Melik

CEO at Planbox and author of the Future-Fit Manifesto. I help organizations build a sustainable culture of innovation. Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn.