The National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) Hackathon 2025 will bring together industry, academia, and the Department of Defense (DoD) from August 25 to 29 to demonstrate innovative solutions for real-world defense challenges. In this Q&A, hackathon co-lead Charles Ott, Maximus vice president and solutions strategist, discusses how hackathons can help accelerate federal technology acquisition and how to maximize the impact of these innovative events.
For those new to the concept: what is a hackathon, and why are government, academia, and industry taking notice?
Hackathons are a powerful way to break down silos and to facilitate cross-collaboration across organizations. At their core, these events are about being curious and rapidly learning technology to creatively solve problems in a limited amount of time. Participants form highly skilled, cross-functional teams to develop solutions quickly, typically over the course of several days. For solution developers and coders, it’s a unique opportunity to tackle complex, mission-specific challenges using the skills and tools available in the moment.
What role do hackathons play in reshaping how federal agencies acquire new technology?
Hackathons help to bridge what we call the ‘Valley of Death’ in technology acquisition, where promising innovations often fail to transition from prototype to adoption using traditional pathways. They do this in several ways. First, hackathons help agencies solve adaptation problems rapidly. Teams working together in this collaborative environment can potentially prototype relevant capabilities in days. This enables requirements to be refined much faster and accelerates proof of concepts for faster acquisition decisions and alternative procurement pathways.
Second, they enable what the Harvard School of Business calls platform diffusion, where you bring together a broad range of platforms so developers and government agencies can identify overlap and assess interoperability with older generation platforms currently deployed. This helps government buyers quickly determine which platforms add mission value, guiding smarter investment decisions while saving taxpayer dollars. Finally, hackathons are a great talent acquisition mechanism. The government can discover highly skilled, fundamentally curious, and motivated people who understand complex systems, AI/ML, and data services, and the hackathon environment gives participants insight into real-world government challenges and use cases. Offering government and industry direct access to talent they may not find through traditional recruitment.
You have been involved in hackathons as a participant and behind the scenes. How does the upcoming NDIA event build on or evolve the traditional hackathon model?
The NDIA hackathon is particularly unique because we’re connecting an exhibition model, where people typically acquire things, with a hackathon environment, where people go to build things. This is about strengthening our defense industrial base by bringing together those with the solutions and those with the acquisition know-how in a collaborative environment.
The federal market is shifting to favor innovation, flexibility, outcomes, and commercial best practices in acquiring technology. This hackathon offers a unique pathway to facilitate identifying and transitioning emerging technology to fielded mission capabilities.
Additionally, the NDIA hackathon is a less restrictive model than traditional, government-hosted hackathons. For those events, you typically couldn’t bring proprietary information or solutions. In this new model, we’re opening the door to commercial products and services with the goal of demonstrating new solution development for government use cases but also showing the DoD what they can buy off the shelf that is applicable to their needs.
How can government agencies better leverage hackathons to drive real mission outcomes?
For a hackathon to deliver real impact, event hosts and government agencies must clearly define the use cases, desired selection criteria, connect government champions for transition, and ensure transparency throughout. As I experienced with military hackathons, having a very specific use case, like developing an innovative solution to transform medical evacuation request processes, for example, creates highly focused innovation. Transparency in outcomes is also key. For NDIA, we’re requiring teams to be clear about their licensing models, what dependencies they used to build their solution on, and any data rights for the information they used in building their solutions. This transparency gives the judges and buyers important real-world implementation considerations.
And of course, clear transition pathways are crucial to move projects forward. We want to help ensure successful solutions are connected with academic grants or industry investment, or find alternative acquisition pathways such as other transaction authorities (OTAs) or Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) agreements through DoD. The ultimate measure of success for a hackathon isn’t just the rating from judges during the event it’s whether those solutions can transition and be integrated with funded operational defense programs to solve real-world challenges. The key is creating an environment where innovation can flourish, and innovation has a clear path to practical application.
Discover More
Interested in hearing more about hackathons and the upcoming NDIA event? Listen to a conversation with Dr. Arun Seraphin, Executive Director of NDIA’s Emerging Technologies Institute, and Maximus Chief Digital and Information Officer Derrick Pledger on the Clickthrough Podcast.