Page - 62 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

is also a goodmethod to integrate different actors into a network in order tomake the process more productive. Especially, the role of the mentors is important to align the ideas to the overall tourism strategy. Another aspect is the cost-saving opportunity when creating prototypes compared to developing them inhouse or with a service provider.Also the feedback for the beta version of theThüCAThas been extremely useful for theDMO. However, when looking at the overall goal of achieving customer benefits and ensuring the competitiveness of a tourist destination, a DMO must additionally guarantee a high quality of the results and the sustainability of the ideas produced during a hackathon. Fromour case study,wehave learned that for ensuring a high quality of ideas produced, it would be recommendable to award more generous prizes for thewinners in order to attract evenmore capable andmotivated people especially programmers. Giving the aspect of sustainability, many ideas are not pursued by organisers of hackathons. This is also the case for the ThüCAThon. It must be shown how ideas deriving from hackathons are pursued, refined and applied, and their effects on themarketmust bemeasured. It is important to realise that with the new approaches to data provision and data processing, new holistic management methods are necessary.Making the best use of all technical innova- tionsandmeetingnewcustomerdemandscanonlybeachieved throughadaptations in organisational strategy and rethinking in management. A hackathon as an entrepreneurial management tool must therefore be embedded in an overall approach to strategic entrepreneurship (see Fig. 1). However, from the case study, we have learned that the DMO in Thuringia is currently actively rethinking and developing its role in the renewal process (or- ganisational innovation, see Fig. 1). For this purpose, the DMO has created a competence centre for the implementation of ThüCAT, which takes on the responsibility of guiding and distributing all content that comes from partners, tourism organisations at the regional and local level and from tourism service providersat thecompany level.Thismeans thatnot everysinglecompanyhas togo digital, but the TTG develops concepts and solutions, implements them and involves all actors in Thuringia in them or passes the results on to them (Dwif-Consulting 2017: 45 ff.). In view of the statements made by those respon- sible, theDMOis pursuing anopen innovation strategy inwhich active “inbound” processes are carried out by integrating creative people by using tools such as hackathons. Furthermore, the DMO follows “outbound” processes because it is looking for interestedparties for the data available and sees itself as a platform that ensures thequalityandup-to-datednessof thedataandencouragesapproaches to its use. Following this approach, the DMO could also try to find partners who are willing to test andbring applications to themarket (seeFig. 1, steps 7&8). It then follows an outbound process, following its new role as a smart data platform. Strategic entrepreneurship approaches can help to reclassify and define this role. When considering theDMOpresented here, a strategic realignment (see Fig. 1) is already taking place in order to reposition itself against competitors in the digital economysuchasGoogleorFacebookandpowerful travelportals likebooking.com or Expedia. This realignment was triggered by the technologies shown in this 64 N. Richter andD. Dragoeva