Hackathons as a Company – University Collaboration Tool to Boost Circularity Innovations and Digitalization Enhanced Sustainability.

Companies need to become more environmentally conscious in their actions and business-based operations. In developed countries, there is an increased pressure towards this direction enforced by legal requirements. Moreover, a notion of sustainability is more and more perceived as a business advantage and as part of a successful company’s business models [1, 2]. Companies have various options on how to innovate their products, operations and business models to be more sustainable by e.g. addressing growing income inequality [3] and minimizing their own impact on the deterioration of our natural livelihood [4]. To identify suitable options companies often collaborate with higher education institutions to develop innovative ideas. And within this realm, lies option for collaboration in the form of hackathons and e.g. code camps. These events are great sources of innovation and these special cases they also did support collaboration driven sustainability innovation seeding too. This work is based on case studies and experience-based evidence on how companies were successful in generating ideas for their operations and new potential options for new implementation directions to support higher levels of circularity in their supply chains. Additionally, companies have been able to improve their services to support their customers’ actions to minimize energy consumption and improve operations to positively affect CO2 emissions thus reducing their carbon footprint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]