30th
Congrats to ChallengePost on a great year (+ Fast Company profile)
ChallengePost really has had an incredible year. This Fast Company profile of the CEO is worth a read.
Overall, this is a story about huge establishments like the US Government, Samsung, and the World Bank working with a tiny startup to open up to the public for the first time in a meaningful new way that points not only towards a more open and transparent government, but a way that corporations, too, can collaborate innovate and do R&D out in the open, instead of behind closed doors.
Challengepost = long-tail of Netflix Prize or the X-Prize, a challenge platform, funded by Betaworks, Dyson, Calacanis, etc. and Woz is on the board (oh snap).
Challenges, as a vehicle for innovation, are both capital efficient and unusually successful. In the process, they capture the public’s imagination and ambition. In fact, this Harvard Business Review study shows that successful problem-solving percentages go up by 30 percent when a challenge is employed:
http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/07-050.pdf
Among other things, this year ChallengePost was selected by the US government to host all of their challenges via a new effort called Challenge.gov — which is an initiative is a product of the March 8 Guidance from the Office of the President, which committed to make available a web-based platform for government challenges and prizes. ChallengePost was selected to create the platform for posting and managing national calls to action.
The company was selected because of its experience running over 100 ambitious online challenges for corporations, non-profits, individuals and local and federal government agencies, including the World Bank, the City of New York, First Lady Michelle Obama, Samsung, Thompson Reuters, and more…
Disclosure: ChallengePost is a client.
