Challenge Accepted: Driving Innovation through Competition
There’s something about being presented with a challenge that inspires people to be innovative. Perhaps that’s why an organization like USAID launched its Grand Challenges for Development initiative, which is rooted in the fundamental belief that engaging the world in the quest for solutions is critical to instigating breakthrough progress using science and technology. The World Bank’s Apps for Development initiative is another instance where an organization leveraged a competition to bring together the best ideas from software developers and development practitioners to create innovative applications; in fact, we've been writing about these app challenges for years.
Of course, when a cash prize is attached to propositions like these, imaginations are bound to go wild, as evidenced by the winners of the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge competition, which were announced last month. Working in partnership with the Ford Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation, the Knight Foundation launched their challenge initiative in February of this year, where the posed the question: How can we strengthen the Internet for free expression and innovation? to which they received 704 responses. While the 19 winners (to whom a total of $3.4 million dollars was awarded) all focused on themes related to Internet access, transparency and safety, the solutions they offered were varied.
Take for instance TextSecure, which received a $416,000 grant to expand their mobile secure messaging app available for Androids to iOS and other mobile systems or Internet to Go, which was awarded $400,000 to increase Internet usage by lending wireless hotspots to underserved communities in Chicago. Among the winners who received prototype funding were The Anti-Censorship Alert System, which will be developing a series of tools that will allow the public to see a blocked websites using widgets that enable the distribution and decentralization needed to access proxies or mirrored versions of blocked sites.
Of course it goes without saying that challenges are only one of of many ways to engage creative minds to solve global problem and that innovation needs to be discussed in the right context. While it may not be a given that competitions and incentives lead to new products that will transform the world, I think it’s safe to say that they do encourage organizations to try new or different things. It’s precisely that kind of incremental change that informs the work that we do at NDI when supporting democratic development abroad. While it’s not an easy task to solve issues related to Internet freedom and the free flow of information, our team has accepted the challenge to promote transparency and accountability abroad, and is working dilegently to achieve that aim.