Prizes and Challenges
As an early adopter of challenge approaches, NASA continues to offer diverse opportunities for citizen participation in meeting technology needs – promoting public involvement and awareness of the United States space program while creating an environment where one person can make a substantial difference. These models are inherently participatory, as large and diverse communities of solvers around the world may pose a potential solution to a challenge. Depending on the type of need, solvers may collaborate on a solution or establish a partnership with NASA to develop the proposed deliverable. This process facilitates cross-discipline synergies, and provides NASA with the opportunity to supplement its internal expertise with a broad community of experts it otherwise would not be able to access.
NASA will continue its Centennial Challenges Program with the recent announcement of new challenges. In addition, NASA has established a new position, the Prizes & Design Challenges Executive, to coordinate, monitor and evaluate the agency’s prizes and design challenges. The official in this new position reports to the Office of Chief Technologist (OCT), and provides Agency-wide strategic leadership and representation within government-wide “community of practice” working groups as identified in the Executive Office of the President’s memorandum providing “Guidance on the Use of Challenges and Prizes to Promote Open Government.”
Centennial Challenges
In September 2011, NASA awarded the largest prize in aviation history with the Green Flight Centennial Challenge ($1.35m for first place). Created to inspire the development of more fuel-efficient aircraft and spark the start of a new electric airplane industry, the first and second place teams achieved twice the fuel efficiency required in the competition, flying 200 miles using just over a half-gallon of fuel equivalent per passenger. For 2012 and beyond, OCT announced the following challenges as a part of their Centennial Challenges Program: Nano Satellite Challenge, Night Rover Challenge, and Sample Return Robot.
Activity goal:
Launch of 2 challenges over the next fiscal year. (1 year)
NASA Tournament Lab
NASA has partnered with Harvard Business School and TopCoder to create the NASA Tournament Lab (NTL), which will enable a community of coders to compete amongst each other to create the most innovative, most efficient, and most optimized solutions for specific, real-world challenges being faced by NASA researchers.
The NTL provides an online virtual facility for NASA researchers with a computational or complex data processing challenge to post ideas for potential algorithmic or software development challenges. These ideas can then be discussed, refined, and voted upon by peers. Chosen problems will be converted into problem statements and run as competitions within the NTL community. Software developers, algorithmists, and mathematicians will compete with each other to create a winning solution, as measured by internal code quality, performance against benchmarks, and the ability to be integrated into NASA systems.
Activity goal:
Completion of twenty challenge tournaments over next 2 years. (2 years)
Open Innovation Service Providers
NASA Innovation Pavilion
NASA has partnered with InnoCentive to provide the public with the opportunity to solve difficult challenges facing the U.S. space program through the use of crowdsourcing methodologies. Solutions to the challenges on the NASA Innovation Pavilion will not only benefit space exploration, but may also further the development of commercial products and services in other industries. Posted challenges attract thousands of potential solvers from many different countries. The open innovation challenges aid NASA’s efforts to become a more transparent Agency while also diversifying the number of potential external collaborators for NASA. This model is inherently participatory, as large and diverse communities of solvers around the world may pose a potential solution to a NASA challenge.
Technology Scout/Consortium
Unlike the crowdsourcing methodology, the technology scout approach employs a strategy that is focused on specific technological needs that require partnerships or consortiums of experts to help develop solutions or technologies instead of a developed solution Similar to the crowdsourcing approach, the technology scout identifies potential partnerships from across the globe extending NASA’s technological reach and access to previously untapped solution spaces.
Activity goals:
- Completion of 3 Innovation Pavilion challenges. (1 year)
- Completion of 3 technology needs via consortium. (1 year)
NASA@Work
Based on the success of the external open innovation service provider programs, an internal crowdsourcing program entitled NASA@work was initiated. NASA@work is a web-based platform supported and developed by InnoCentive. Unlike external crowdsourcing, the objective of an internal crowdsourcing based platform, such as NASA@work, is to leverage the breadth and depth of the expertise already present within the organization. NASA includes an extensive number of experts that are not only discipline diverse but are also geographically dispersed. This presents a challenge for NASA, specifically with being able to fully utilize its workforce and its resources across 10 centers agency-wide. The objective of the NASA@work is to connect the collective knowledge of individuals from all areas within the NASA organization via a private web based environment. The platform provides a venue for NASA Challenge Owners, those looking for solutions or new ideas, to pose challenges to internal solvers, those within NASA with the skill and desire to create solutions.
Activity goal:
Completion of 12 internal challenges within the next year. (1 year)
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