A Brief History of Challenge or Crowd-sourcing Contests
(borrowed from a paper written by my colleague Michael Maltese)
For centuries, wealthy individuals, organizations, and governments have offered prizes to address specific challenges from engineering to mathematics. One of the more famous such contests dates back to the British Longitude Act in 1714, when the British government offered prizes for measuring longitude to varying degrees of accuracy. In 1773, just three years before his death, clockmaker, carpenter, and inventor John Harrison claimed the top prize by inventing what is widely considered to be the first accurate chronometer.
Centuries later, French hotelier Raymond Orteig offered a $25,000 prize to the pilot who made the first nonstop flight between Paris and New York City. This financial incentive compelled a number of the most highly skilled pilots in the world to take on the challenge. Out of obscurity, Charles Lindbergh, a 25-year old air mail pilot, succeeded in winning the prize in May 1927, ushering in the new era of commercial flight. Since then, a number of challenge competitions have been held with great success, especially the Clay Mathematics Millennium Prizes and the X Prizes, the first of which awarded $10 million to the first team to launch a reusable rocket that would spur technological development of low-cast space flight. Companies like InnoCentive now work with companies to crowd-source their more difficult challenges, and in the field of social entrepreneurship, Ashoka now runs a number of contests focused on social and economic challenges.
These competitions imbue the belief that the best solutions can come from anywhere. Moreover, they cost-effectively leverage the collective problem-solving power of a large number of individuals, some who may not even be knowledgeable about the specific area, and focus their attention through a prize incentive. As the Orteig Prize demonstrated, these bottom-up contests leverage far more money and brainpower towards solving a problem than if an organization decided instead to find experts and fund their research.
Coming from a grassroots organizing background, I find this system for soliciting solutions to be the next best thing since knocking on doors and showing up at native plants meetings to find campaign volunteers. So I thought I might apply this innovation creation station idea to a current challenge in my life: deciding what to do for my birthday.
When I turned 16, my high school friends threw me a surprise Rocky Horror Picture Show themed birthday party. Yes, they did. Perhaps because that was so unique, I didn't try to organize anything particularly exciting until just last year, when Melanie and I organized a trivia party.
(notice Wyatt's shirt, a party favor)You wouldn't think that a bunch of 20-somethings who don't all know each other would sit still in a tiny living room long enough to play 4 rounds of homemade trivia but it went surprisingly well. It was also potluck and the food was delicious.
So the question remains,
That is your challenge dear readers! Please help the cause by commenting on this post and leaving a suggestion or voting on one of the ideas below.
Here is what has been suggested so far:
- Stone Soup party, everyone brings an ingredient for the soup
- Mad Libs
- Apples to Apples (we would make our own cards at the party)
- A special concert, ideally including the Macrotones and the one and only Nariman Moghtaderi
- A video scavenger hunt (it's WAY too cold to do this in January in Boston unfortunately)
- Bring your favorite food that you've never made (maybe too stressful?)
- Pub Crawl
- Beck Hansen Party - each person must personify a line from a Beck song, i.e. "cocaine nosejob", "devil's haircut," or "hot sex in back rows"
Hit me up! The deadline is December 27th. The party will be sometime in late January. Winners receive an invitation to and/or VIP pictures from the event.
