Building a platform for competitive innovation

We created a custom platform to host the XPRIZE Foundation’s $7 million contest for promoting universal literacy

BEFORE

Innovation catalyst the XPRIZE Foundation had begun planning a new competition to promote adult literacy

Needed tech infrastructure to communicate with competitors, track entry efficacy, and synthesize data for evaluation

AFTER

A mobile app built to facilitate communication, resource transfer, and tracking of contest competitors and their submissions

A flexible analytics-focused SDK designed for easy incorporation into competitors’ prototypes

An analytics setup primed to receive data from the SDK-integrated entries, enabling performance comparisons for judging

Background

Inspiring big breakthroughs

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.

Challenge

It takes a village

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.

Process

Shaping a solution management system

XPRIZE invited us to participate in the strategic planning for the contest’s rollout and management. By evaluating the prize committee’s goals, constraints, and timelines, we were able to make recommendations for designing and implementing the key technical pieces needed to support the prize: an app for managing submissions; a performance-tracking SDK for entrants to incorporate into their solutions; and a scalable analytics platform for evaluating that data for judging purposes.

Solution

Analytics with a side of SDK

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.

Praise from our clients

Twenty Ideas has been a critical and tremendous partner throughout our work on the Adult Literacy XPRIZE. Mike and the team are true thought partners who are consistently able to find the optimal technical solutions to operational challenges and to apply a strategic mindset to everything they do. XPRIZE competitions present grand challenges to competing teams, but they also represent implementational challenges to the XPRIZE team. Having Twenty Ideas as our collaborators in this effort has made all the difference.