How Hacking Is Helping Businesses Beyond the Tech Sector A variety of businesses, from retail to service industries, are organizing internal events using the creative talents of their own employees to solve, or hack, problems.

When entrepreneur Jeff Raider wanted to solve a problem for a nonprofit in need, he found a perfect resource: his own employees. Each year his company, Harry's, a New York-based purveyor of shaving gear, donates 1 percent of its sales and time to nonprofit organizations, in partnership with City Year, an AmeriCorps program. City Year was struggling to convince young men to commit a year of their lives to volunteering, and Raider believed his staff could help come up with a solution.

"We were trying to solve a big, out-of-the-box problem that required a diverse set of skills across our organization," Raider says. "We needed everyone to focus on it at the same time and work together to come up with something special, unique and different than what City Year had thought of."

Cue the hackathon. Part jam session, part competition, these loosely structured marathon events once evoked images of caffeine-fueled computer programmers cranking away on their laptops, pumping out code to build websites, services or apps. But applied beyond the engineering department, companywide hackathons can sort out all manner of issues, from small daily headaches around workflow or the mailroom to large-scale customer-service problems—even the creation of new product lines.