I recently served as a mentor at a hackathon and came away shaking my head. In hackathons, teams compete intensively, typically for just a day or two, to create software (and sometimes hardware) solutions. What struck me was that most of the participants — young, tech-savvy programmers, engineers, and others — seemed largely uninformed or unconcerned about intellectual property. Participants tend to come from many different organizations, and often view hackathons as recreational social events, so perhaps they can be forgiven for not focusing on IP. But the companies they come from need to pay attention — or risk losing valuable IP.