Challenges as the Future of Public Sector Innovation
Brandon Kessler, the founder of ChallengePost, speech at the George Washington University's School of Business Social Graph seminar, offered interesting insights into how the Public Sector can utilise their crowdsourcing platform to hold public innovation contests.
ChallengePost recently won a major contract with the General Services Administration to develop Challenge.gov, a governmentwide online challenge platform. The site currently has about 75 contests posted by dozens of federal agencies.
Kessler outlined the benefits of online challenges as thinking outside the box, paying for performance, galvanizing the public and capturing a “huge” return on investment:
The aggregate value of the challenge almost always exceeds the prize money
He also noted how the most successful challenges are specific in nature, with common sense rules, the right incentives and “marketing, marketing, marketing,”. On incentives he noted the importance of peer-recognition and questioned the importance of purely financial incentives as a means of building sustainable communities around innovation initiatives:
Money is an inefficient compensation mechanism
For more on Kessler's presentation, check FCW's article on the topic.
