A Communities Guide to Prize and Challenge Competitions
Playbook Intro
Challenge and prize competitions are a popular way for communities to tackle complex problems collaboratively. These competitions offer financial and exposure incentives, encouraging cross-sector collaboration and providing support for innovation. The winning teams gain credibility and public awareness, and communities benefit from innovative solutions and potential new funding sources. By focusing on outcomes rather than processes, challenge competitions spur innovation and can help unlock systemic change.
This playbook offers city and nonprofit leaders the tools they need to create effective and sustainable challenge programs, with templates, external resources, and exercises proven across six phases.
The Communities Guide to Prize and Challenge Competitions offers examples from actual communities that have successfully run prize and challenge competitions to spur innovation. Some of the key steps covered include:
- Understanding prize and challenge competitions
- Assessing if a competition is the right approach to solve a community problem
- Defining a problem and writing a problem statement
- Building a team
- Selecting a challenge structure
- Promoting the challenge competition
- Evaluating proposals
- And much more!
