People, organizations and government are beginning to realize and leverage the immense power of the crowd through contests and challenges, especially using Web 2.0 technology, and offering prizes for success. The “crowd” simply refers to a large group of people or a community, usually the general public. Today, the Case Foundation is hosting a public-private strategy session with the White House about “driving innovation and civic dialogue through the use of prizes, challenges and open grantmaking.” It’s all about reaching new people and ideas through innovative means. The Foundation has successfully employed this model before, such as through the Make It Your Own Awards.

The concept is not foreign to government. Last year, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency sponsored a contest in which ten giant balloons were placed around the country, and a prize was offered to a team of people who could locate them all the fastest. The goal was designed “to test the way social networking and lesser-known Web-based techniques can help accomplish a large-scale, time-critical task.” In addition, as a story in today’s Washington Post points out, NASA has used contests to develop “flexible astronaut gloves, a lunar rover and wireless power transmission.” The winners came from the least likely of places. The story included a great anecdote that showed this is not new:

“One of the most famous contests was sponsored in the 18th century by the British Parliament in a desperate bid to determine longitude at sea as ocean-going commerce was exploding. A clockmaker, John Harrison, won the bulk of the prize, worth 20,000 British pounds, with a marine chronometer capable of keeping precise time in rough and changing sea conditions.

“No one expected a craftsman to win it. They expected one of the great astronomers to win it using some kind of astronomical approach,” said Andy Petro, manager of NASA’s Centennial Challenges program.”

Think about what that means for innovation – that the best ideas are in areas just now being tapped into on a large scale. Atlas Corps founder Scott Beale tells a good story of how the Gates Foundation was wracking their brains about how to distribute malaria nets to families without encountering the problem of the men selling them to others in order to get money for food. The game-changing idea didn’t come from a room of the most educated and best paid staff person – it came from a native who suggested making the nets pink instead of blue, and thus drastically devaluing it (no man wants to sell a pink net, duh).

So the starting point in this conversation, and why this model is so important, is a humbling recognition that – we don’t know it all. A good incentive, a simple process and a means to reaching the crowd has the power to transform innovation and problem-solving. [Sometimes the first ingredient isn't even necessary.]

Coincidentally, at a ServiceNation coalition meeting last week, member organizations were given the opportunity to suggest ideas about where the movement should go or things it should do. I stood up and stated simply, “Use new technology to leverage the wisdom and power of the crowd.” Indeed, instead of a group of “experts” sitting in the W Hotel deciding where the movement should go, why not use Google Moderator and open it up everyone? As I heard complaints in the room about organizations adapting their programs to foundation priorities just so they can get funding, why not foster a system of funding like the Pepsi Refresh Contest (where all you have to do is convince other people, again not a panel of “experts,” that your idea is worthy of funding)? Everyone was also talking about outcome based measurements and how to measure effectiveness, why not crowdsource and then standardize metrics to use in such evalutation?

I’m not sure the room got the point. It’s a new idea. And my guess is that the more examples and successes that can be pointed to and modeled after, the more people and organizations will begin to adopt it. I’m enthused by the Case Foundation’s collaboration with the White House to speed this process up.

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