Government Prize Contests Want More Ideas, Less Software

Federal agencies are offering more public prize money in search of technology solutions to internal problems, compared to previous years.

Since President Barack Obama signed the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act in 2010—giving agencies the authority to launch their own public contests—about 35 agencies have run 134 contests, and about 47 of them were in fiscal 2015.

That year, agencies made 20 percent more prize money available to the public than they did the year before, a White House Office of Science and Technology progress report on federal contests suggests.

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Previous contests have asked citizens to come up with a variety of items, including better personal protective gear for health care workers with Ebola patients and sophisticated cyber-defense systems. They are part of a broad effort to tap into a knowledge base outside government, including technologists who aren't interested in formal government contracts.

They also help agencies "reach beyond the 'usual suspects' to increase the number of solvers tackling a problem and identify novel approaches, without bearing high levels of risk,” the report said.

Compared to the previous year, the number of challenges focused on technology in fiscal 2015 grew by about 23 percent, reaching about 50 percent.

The most common solutions sought were "ideas," comprising more than 40 percent of challenges in fiscal 2015, up more than 5 percent from the previous year, the report said. Between fiscal 2014 and 2015, the number of challenges asking for software and app solutions decreased from about a third to a fifth, the report found, suggesting "agencies are using a larger fraction of prize competitions for hardware and scientific solutions" instead of for software.

The focus on technology could detract from other potential goals. With the increased number of tech-focused challenges, there was also a 16 percent decrease in challenges designed to "engage new people and communities," between fiscal 2014 and 2015, the report found.

Some agencies also use challenges as a way to save money on technology research and development, the report found. In 2015, for instance, NASA asked the public to help overcome the International Space Station’s inability to handle astronauts' large email attachments. Twelve winners were granted a total of $23,638 for their attempts; according to a NASA estimate, solving the problem in-house would have cost $193,000, but the challenge cost about $81,000 to operate.