Page - 59 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

the 24 h, all teamswithout exceptionmanaged to develop their ideas to themax- imum, create first prototypes of apps and show their results not only theoretically but also practically. The presentations were public, and each team had approxi- mately six or sevenminutes to present their product and answer questions. There were a total of three awardwinners as follows. “First place: The winner of the hackathon was the “What a Day” app team. A personalised, target group-specific travel configurator accompanies the guest interactively along the entire customer journey and always takes current situations or needs into account. The team has managed to integrate all four customer seg- ments listed in the regional tourismstrategyand tooffer themvariousorganisedday tourswhichguests can adapt as theywishwith simple swiping andfilter functions. Secondplacewent to the“SesameStreet” team,whichdevelopedaneasyway to migrate data from the existingcontentmanagement systemsof tourists toThüCAT. They also impressedwith an entertaining and professional presentation. Thirdplacewent to the team for the “B@on”project,whichproposes to install a so-called dash button for restaurants to signal “Weare open”or “Weare closed” with the simple click of a button. This smart button then transmits this information directly to ThüCAT, from where it is to be played in real time on all different channels. Restaurants avoid disappointment in front of closed bars; the visitor can always know reliably which nearby restaurants are open”4 (Grinda 2019). Analysis of theCase Study Thesurveygave the followinganswers: for almost all participants, theThüCAThon was thefirst hackathonever.Only twoof theparticipantshadalreadyattendedsuch events,oneofwhichwasaculturalmanagementhackathon inwhich the formatwas verydifferent.Theother experiencedparticipantwas alreadyahackathon“veteran” with five hackathons under their belt. All the respondents named different moti- vations for participation. For some, including students, themainmotivationwas to get toknownewpeopleandmakecontacts thatmightbehelpful later forfindingan employer. Others saw this as away to gathermore information about ThüCAT to better understand how itworks.Another reason for participatingwas the challenge of quickly developing something new and learning something new. Others were sentby their company.Andeveryonealsoenjoyedworkingoncommunityprojects. Regarding the question of the extent towhich open innovationmethods, and in particular the hackathon tool, are suitable for contributing to the development or problem-solving in tourism, the study concluded that the implementation is enor- mously valuable for tourism. It is theflexibility, the quick reaction to changes and the difficulty in predicting trends in people’s travel behaviour thatmake tourism a branch of the economy that the nature of open and experimental methods is well suited to. 4Free translation fromGerman by the author, (Grinda 2019). Digital Entrepreneurship andAgileMethods… 61