NASA have undoubtedly been one of the most enthusiastic adopters of open innovation.  The space agency has run a number of crowdsourcing challenges over the past few years.  Now, they want to find out just how valuable those projects have been, and of course, how they could be designed more effectively.

They’ve signaled an intention to research the empirically validated science that has resulted from the open innovation challenges.  The hope is to uncover some of the design parameters that make such calls to action effective.

Whilst NASA will be the primary focus of the research, it’s also hoped that it will have some applications for other government agencies.  The plan is for the study to provide the following:

• Provide presentations and training to educate federal employees on using open innovation
• Evaluate the architecture, and scoring mechanisms, of open innovation challenges
• List plans to use data science to design open innovation challenges

The agency has run many crowdsourced challenges over the years, with many of them drawing a significant number of participants.  As such, they represent a good candidate for analyzing the true benefits of the approach to the wider goals of the organization.

There is no initial indication of when the analysis will be published, but rest assured I’ll keep my eyes and ears open and share the findings as and when it is.