Digital Entrepreneurship and Agile Methods—A Hackathon Case Study

“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 and without restriction to develop innovative applications for travellers at any time?” (“German National 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 organisations (DMO: “Public or public–private entity whose aim is to foster, plan and coordinate the tourism development of a destination as a whole”.) (“IGI Global”, 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: “We were looking for a way to make the data of Thuringian tourism up-to-date, findable and freely usable and thus provide the path for open innovation and new technologies.” (Detlef Klinge, Thüringer Tourismus GmbH 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 and on entrepreneurial management methods such as the hackathon. This method, in turn, must be embedded in a holistic management approach; otherwise, creative results will be lost even before they come to the market. The question is how these technologies and management methods must be implemented in DMOs so that they generate sustainable competitive advantages and customer benefits for the respective travel destination.