Page - 49 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

Digital Entrepreneurship andAgile Methods—AHackathonCase Study Nancy Richter andDjanina Dragoeva Abstract “What if, when they ask ‘Alexa, where can I do something here tonight?’, travellers no longer receive the answer ‘I don’t know’?And, could start-ups use all tourist data freely andwithout restriction to develop innovative applications for travellers at any time?” (“GermanNational Tourist Board”, n.d.). These and similar questions are currently being asked by those responsible for tourism marketing and product development, such as destination management organi- sations (DMO: “Public or public–private entitywhose aim is to foster, plan and coordinate the tourismdevelopmentof adestinationasawhole”.) (“IGIGlobal”, n.d.) in Germany. In particular, the travel destination Thuringia sees itself as a pioneer on topics such as AI, decentralised data structures and new types of interactions:“Wewere looking foraway tomake thedataofThuringian tourism up-to-date, findable and freely usable and thus provide the path for open innovation and new technologies.” (DetlefKlinge, Thüringer TourismusGmbH retrieved from “German National Tourist Board”, n.d.). To meet these challenges, the DMO relies on the processing of open data in a tourist content architecture andonentrepreneurialmanagementmethods suchas thehackathon. This method, in turn, must be embedded in a holistic management approach; otherwise, creative resultswill be lost evenbefore they come to themarket. The question is how these technologies and management methods must be implemented inDMOsso that theygenerate sustainable competitive advantages and customer benefits for the respective travel destination. N. Richter (&) University of Applied Sciences, Schmalkalden, Germany e-mail: n.richter@hs-sm.de D.Dragoeva BauhausUniversity,Weimar, Germany ©TheAuthor(s) 2021 M.Soltanifar et al. (eds.),DigitalEntrepreneurship, FutureofBusiness andFinance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53914-6_3 51