The XPRIZE Foundation designs incentivizes competitions to solve the great challenges of our time, inspiring innovations that are out of this world (sometimes literally!). Since 1994, the organization has spurred world-changing advancements in private space flight, environmental conservation, human health, and more. In 2018, when the foundation began work on a new 7 million dollar Barbara Bush Foundation Adult Literacy XPRIZE, the organizers reached out to us for help creating the technical infrastructure to support it.

To quote artist, philanthropist, and prize recipient Pharrell Williams, pursuing an XPRIZE is like entering “the Olympics of science.” Mounting an international innovation competition requires coordination, communication, and infrastructure designed to manage it all. And 25+ years of experience had taught the foundation that getting any new XPRIZE off the ground brings its own unique challenges and demands. In this case, the foundation needed a well integrated suite of digital tools to manage, track, and evaluate competition entries – and a partner with the technical expertise to create it.

By building a comprehensive analytics platform, Twenty Ideas monitors, synthesizes and reports usage across all the semi-finalists applications. Each semifinalist incorporated our custom SDK (software development kit) into their solution, enabling XPRIZE to collect relevant, realtime, and consistent information about its use and efficacy. This information contributed to a fair, efficient, evidence-based evaluation of prize contestants and was critical to ensuring that the prize funds would drive real-world results.