Implementation of Federal Prize Authority: 

Fiscal Year 2012 Progress Report

A Report from the

Office of Science and Technology Policy

In Response to the Requirements of the

America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010

December 2013
2

ABOUT THE OFFICE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY

The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) advises the President on the effects 

of science and technology on domestic and international affairs. The office serves as a 

source of scientific and technological analysis and judgment for the President with 

respect to major policies, plans, and programs of the Federal government. OSTP leads 

an interagency effort to develop and implement sound science and technology policies 

and budgets. The office works with the private sector to ensure Federal investments in 

science and technology contribute to economic prosperity, environmental quality, and 

national security. For more information, visit http://www.ostp.gov. 

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

This document is a work of the U.S. Government and is in the public domain (see 17 

U.S.C. 105). 
3

DEPARTMENT, AGENCY, OFFICE, AND DIVISION ABBREVIATIONS

AF Air Force (part of DOD)

AFRL Air Force Research Laboratory (part of AF/DOD)

CDC Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (part of HHS)

CMS Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (part of HHS)

DARPA Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (part of DOD)

DOC Department of Commerce

DOD Department of Defense

DOE Department of Energy

DOL Department of Labor

EPA Environmental Protection Agency

EERE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (part of DOE)

FDA Food and Drug Administration

GSA General Services Administration

HHS Department of Health and Human Services

NASA National Aeronautics and Space Administration

NIBIB National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (part 

of NIH/HHS) 

NIEHS National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (part of 

NIH/HHS)

NIST National Institute of Standards and Technology (part of DOC)

NIH National Institutes of Health (part of HHS)

NOAA National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (part of DOC)

ODPHP Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (part of HHS)

OMB Office of Management and Budget

ONC Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information 

Technology (part of HHS)

OPM Office of Personnel Management

OSTP Office of Science and Technology Policy

SBA Small Business Administration

USAID U.S. Agency for International Development

USPTO United States Patent and Trademark Office (part of DOC)
4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY............................................................................................................... 5

INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................................ 7

1. BENEFITS OF PRIZES IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR ........................................................................... 8

2. SUPPORT FOR SCALING THE USE OF PRIZES.......................................................................... 11

3. HIGHLIGHTS AND TRENDS FROM PRIZES CONDUCTED UNDER COMPETES IN FY 2012 ................. 15

CONCLUSION......................................................................................................................... 22

APPENDIX 1: AGENCY PROGRAMS CONDUCTED UNDER THE AMERICA COMPETES REAUTHORIZATION 

ACT OF 2010........................................................................................................................ 23

APPENDIX 2: AGENCY PROGRAMS CONDUCTED UNDER AUTHORITIES OTHER THAN THE AMERICA 

COMPETES REAUTHORIZATION ACT OF 2010........................................................................... 80
5

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

On January 4, 2011, President Obama signed into the law the America COMPETES 

Reauthorization Act (COMPETES), granting all agencies broad authority to conduct prize 

competitions to spur innovation, solve tough problems, and advance their core 

missions.

Prizes have an established track record of spurring innovation in the private and 

philanthropic sectors. This report details examples of how well-designed prizes 

integrated into a broader innovation strategy have enabled Federal agencies to: 

• Pay only for success and establish an ambitious goal without having to 

predict which team or approach is most likely to succeed;

• Reach beyond the “usual suspects” to increase the number of solvers tackling 

a problem and to identify novel approaches, without bearing high levels of 

risk;

• Bring out-of-discipline perspectives to bear; and

• Increase cost-effectiveness to maximize the return on taxpayer dollars. 

The Obama Administration has taken important steps to make prizes a standard tool in 

every agency’s toolbox. The September 2009 Strategy for American Innovation

1

recognized the potential for prizes to mobilize America’s ingenuity to solve some of the 

Nation’s most pressing challenges. In March 2010, the Office of Management and 

Budget (OMB) issued a formal policy framework2to guide agency leaders in using prizes 

to advance their core missions. In September 2010, the Administration launched 

Challenge.gov3, a one-stop shop where entrepreneurs and citizen solvers can find 

public-sector prizes. By September 2012, Challenge.gov had featured more than 200 

competitions from over 45 Federal agencies, departments, and bureaus.4

The prize authority in COMPETES supports this effort. By giving agencies a clear legal 

path, the legislation makes it dramatically easier for agencies to use prizes. By 

significantly expanding the authority of all Federal agencies to conduct prize 

competitions, the legislation enables agencies to pursue more ambitious prizes with 

robust incentives.

Since the signing of the Act in January 2011, the Administration has laid the policy and 

legal groundwork to take maximum advantage of the new prize authority in the years to 

come. Policy and legal staff in the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and 

 

1 http://www.whitehouse.gov/innovation/strategy and 

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/innovationstrategy-prizes.pdf

2 http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/memoranda_2010/m10-11.pdf

3 http://www.challenge.gov/

4 http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/09/05/challengegov-two-years-and-200-prizes-later
6

OMB jointly developed a Fact Sheet and Frequently Asked Questions memorandum5,

issued in August 2011, which provided guidance to help streamline implementation of 

the new, government-wide authority.

Agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the 

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have established strategies and policies to 

further accelerate widespread use of the new prize authority granted to them through 

COMPETES. Some agencies, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration 

(NASA) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), have personnel 

dedicated to lead prize design and administration efforts at their agencies and to 

provide internal support to program managers interested in making use of prizes.

As many agencies expand their use of the authorities provided to them under 

COMPETES, some agencies have continued to administer prizes and challenges 

developed under other pre-existing authorities, including agency-specific authorities, 

grant-making authority, and procurement authority, such as that provided by the 

Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), adding additional lessons learned and best 

practices regarding the use of prizes and challenges.

In addition, as called for in Section 24(n) of the Act, the General Services Administration 

(GSA) launched in July 2011 a contract vehicle6to dramatically decrease the amount of 

time required for agencies to tap the private-sector expertise that is so critical to early 

success. In Fiscal Year 2012 (FY 2012), agencies initiated their use of this contract 

vehicle. Adding to the support for the use of prizes, a government-wide Center of 

Excellence, led by NASA, provided multiple agencies support for the full lifecycle of pilot 

prize competitions: from design, through implementation, to post-prize evaluation.

The authority provided in COMPETES led to significant new efforts applying prizes to 

national priority areas including energy, health, and employment. In FY 2012, 27 prizes 

were conducted under this authority, compared to seven conducted from JanuarySeptember 2011. Seven agencies including EPA, Department of Commerce (DOC), 

Department of Energy (DOE), Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), 

Department of Labor (DOL), Department of State, and the Small Business Administration 

(SBA) each launched prizes in FY 2012 enabled by the COMPETES authority. This look at 

the expanded use of the COMPETES prize authority in FY 2012, the first full fiscal year of 

 

5 https://cio.gov/wpcontent/uploads/downloads/2012/09/Prize_Authority_in_the_America_COMPETES_Reauthoriz

ation_Act.pdf

6

http://www.gsaelibrary.gsa.gov/ElibMain/sinDetails.do?scheduleNumber=541&specialItemNum

ber=541+4G&executeQuery=YES
7

implementation of that authority, indicates the ways this authority will continue to help 

agencies across the Federal government reap the benefits of high-impact prizes. 

INTRODUCTION

From the 1714 Longitude Prize that stimulated the development of the world’s first 

practical method to determine a ship’s longitude, to the Orteig Prize that inspired 

Charles Lindbergh to fly nonstop from New York to Paris, to the 2011 Oil Cleanup X 

Challenge7awarded to a company from Illinois that demonstrated more than four times 

the previous best tested recovery rate for cleaning up oil from the ocean’s surface, 

prizes have a long record of spurring innovation. A 2009 McKinsey report found that 

philanthropic and private-sector investment in prizes increased significantly in recent 

years, including $250 million in new prize money between 2000 and 2007.8Some of 

these incentive prizes included the GoldCorp Challenge9, the Ansari X Prize10, the Netflix 

Prize11, and the Heritage Health Prize Competition12. 

Inspired by the success of philanthropic and private-sector prizes, the Obama 

Administration has taken important steps to accelerate public-sector adoption of these 

innovative tools. The Strategy for American Innovation recognized the potential for

prizes and challenges to harness America’s ingenuity to solve some of the Nation’s most 

pressing challenges.13 In March 2010, OMB issued a memorandum that provided a 

policy framework to guide agency leaders in using prizes to advance core missions.

14 In 

September 2010, the Administration launched Challenge.gov, a one-stop shop where 

entrepreneurs and citizen solvers can find and engage with public-sector prizes. By 

September 2012, the site had hosted over 200 challenges posted by more than 45 

departments and agencies. By that point, more than 16,000 citizen “solvers” had

participated in these competitions directly on Challenge.gov, with additional entrants 

joining the competitions through other sources.15

 

7

http://www.iprizecleanoceans.org/

8 McKinsey & Company, “And the Winner Is...”; Capturing the promise of philanthropic prizes, 

2009, http://www.mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/SocialInnovation/And_the_winner_is.pdf

9

Fast Company, http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/59/mcewen.html

10 http://space.xprize.org/ansari-x-prize

11 http://www.netflixprize.com/

12 http://www.heritagehealthprize.com/c/hhp

13 http://www.whitehouse.gov/innovation/strategy

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/innovationstrategy-prizes.pdf

14 http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/memoranda_2010/m10-11.pdf

15 http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/09/05/challengegov-two-years-and-200-prizes-later
8

On January 4, 2011, President Obama signed Public Law 111-358, the America 

COMPETES Reauthorization Act. Section 105 of this Act added section 24 (Prize 

Competitions) to the Stevenson-Wydler Technology Innovation Act of 1980 to provide 

all agencies broad authority to conduct prize competitions in order to spur innovation, 

solve tough problems, and advance their core missions. By giving agencies a simple and 

clear legal path, the Act supports the Administration’s effort to make prizes a standard 

tool in every Federal agency’s toolbox.

The Act also requires OSTP to annually submit to the Committee on Commerce, Science, 

and Transportation of the Senate and the Committee on Science and Technology of the 

House of Representatives a report on the activities carried out under the new prize 

authority during the preceding fiscal year. 

This report documents the benefits the Federal government has already reaped from 

using incentive prizes, the steps the Administration has taken to establish a lasting

foundation for use of the COMPETES prize authority, and detailed examples from FY 

2012 of how the COMPETES prize authority is increasing the number of agencies that 

use prizes to achieve their missions more efficiently and effectively.

This scope of this report includes an overview of every prize conducted under the 

COMPETES prize authority in FY 2012 (as reported by Federal agencies to OSTP) and 

only selectively covers prizes conducted under other authorities available to agencies 

beyond the authority provided to agencies within COMPETES.

1. BENEFITS OF PRIZES IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR

The unique benefits of prizes have been well documented in the private and 

philanthropic sectors.16 Early adopters in the public sector have begun to reap the 

rewards of well-designed prizes over the last several years. For example, NASA’s Chief 

Technologist Mason Peck reports that “NASA recognizes the extraordinary opportunity 

that prize competitions represent: that they can inspire the development of 

transformative technologies by offering a means to engage with non-traditional sources 

of innovative ideas, all in a remarkably cost-effective way.”

17

 Specifically, prizes have 

enabled the Federal government to:

 

16 See e.g., McKinsey & Company, “And the Winner Is...”; Capturing the promise of philanthropic 

prizes, 2009, http://www.mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/SocialInnovation/And_the_winner_is.pdf

17 NASA Report to Office of Science and Technology Policy on Prize Competitions for Fiscal Year 

2012, submitted by Mason Peck, NASA Chief Technology Officer, to the Office of Science and 

Technology Policy, December 31, 2012
9

 Pay only for success and establish an ambitious goal without having to predict 

which team or approach is most likely to succeed. Contracts and grants are 

awarded based on proposals for future work, forcing agencies to assess merit 

based on past performance at the expense of disruptive innovation. With a focus 

on proven results, prizes empower new, untapped talent to deliver unexpected 

solutions to tough problems.

For example, the $1.4 million Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge,18 which 

was awarded in October 2011 and supported by technical expertise from the 

Department of Interior and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric 

Administration (NOAA), inspired teams of entrepreneurs, engineers, and 

scientists worldwide to develop innovative, rapidly deployable, and highly 

efficient methods of cleaning up oil spills from the ocean surface. The winner, 

Elastec/American Marine – a growing Illinois-based manufacturer of oil spill and 

environmental equipment that uses local talent for nearly all its fabrication –

recovered oil at a rate nearly four times the best previously recorded in 

controlled conditions. This significant advance, which involved grooved, highsurface-area spinning discs that grab large amounts of oil while leaving water 

behind, is all the more exciting given the potential for the novel mechanical 

solution to have a real impact on the industry. The competition judges were 

impressed by entrants’ attention to real-world applications, ease of deployment, 

and consistency of performance in varied conditions. While the prize itself was 

privately funded, by bringing technical expertise to bear in the competition 

judging, the Department of Interior and NOAA advanced important shared goals, 

stimulated the development of new tools that can be brought to bear in future 

oil spills, and generated a treasure trove of data by testing novel technologies 

under controlled conditions.

 Reach beyond the “usual suspects” to increase the number of solvers tackling a 

problem and to identify novel approaches, without bearing high levels of risk.

As Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy once famously said, “No matter who 

you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” Prizes are one 

tool to tap the top talent and best ideas wherever they lie, sourcing 

breakthroughs from a broad pool of both known and unknown sources of 

innovation in a given industry. As solutions are delivered prior to payment, the 

government can benefit from these novel approaches without bearing high 

levels of risk.

In a survey of the nearly 3,000 solvers that competed in seven NASA prizes, 81% 

reported that they had never before responded to a government request for 

 

18 http://www.iprizecleanoceans.org/
10

proposals, let alone worked with NASA,19 evidence of the expanded talent pool 

that prizes can attract.

In FY 2012, the U.S. Census Bureau conducted a prize competition20 that 

challenged statisticians, mathematicians, and other data scientists to analyze 

Census data in order to create a statistical model to predict Decennial Census 

mail return rates at the Census block group level of geography. In order to 

improve the response rate in the future, Census planners need to develop 

appropriate strategies to gain the greatest amount of respondent cooperation 

for efficient data collection. The winning teams’ models used statistical 

methods not previously utilized by the agency. As a result of the competition, 

the Census Bureau will pursue this promising technique. In addition, the 

challenge introduced the Census Planning Database to a new and 

diverse audience of data users, such as software engineers and university 

students focusing in information sciences and technology. The results of this 

prize competition will be used in modeling for the decennial census and 

demographic sample surveys. 

 Bring out-of-discipline perspectives to bear. Empirical research conducted at 

the Harvard Business School has found that breakthrough solutions are most 

likely to come from outside the scientific discipline or at the intersection of two 

fields of study.21

Following the success of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency 

(DARPA) Urban Challenge that demonstrated dramatic leaps forward in the 

capabilities of autonomous vehicles, DARPA’s Shredder Challenge called upon 

computer scientists and puzzle enthusiasts to compete for up to $50,000 by 

piecing together a series of shredded documents. The prize’s goal was to identify 

and assess potential capabilities that could be used by U.S. warfighters operating 

in war zones, but that might also create vulnerabilities related to sensitive 

information that is protected through our own shredding practices throughout 

the U.S. national security community. Almost 9,000 teams registered to 

participate in DARPA's Shredder Challenge and 33 days after the challenge was 

announced, one small San Francisco-based team correctly solved the puzzles. 

The winning team spent nearly 600 person-hours developing algorithms and 

piecing together documents that were shredded into more than 10,000 pieces. 

 

19 http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/572344main_InnoCentive_NASA_PublicReport_2011-0422.pdf

20 http://www.kaggle.com/c/us-census-challenge

21 Jeppesen, Lars Bo, and Karim R. Lakhani. "Marginality and Problem-Solving Effectiveness in 

Broadcast Search." Organization Science 21 (September - October 2010): 1016-1033.
11

DARPA stated that experts had been skeptical that a solution could be produced 

at all, let alone in such a short time frame.22

 Increase cost-effectiveness to maximize the return on taxpayer dollars. As 

teams compete not just for the cash purse, but also for the associated validation, 

prestige, and satisfaction that results from solving important problems, prizes 

incent significant additional private-sector and philanthropic investment, 

leveraging the prize purse’s impact. In the Orteig Prize won by Charles Lindbergh

in 1927, nine teams spent a cumulative $400,000 to win the $25,000 prize 

purse.

23 More recently, the Ansari X PRIZE was won in 2004 by Burt Rutan and 

SpaceShipOne, after the 26 competing teams spent more than $100 million to 

win the prize.24

Prizes for open innovation offer these benefits, as well as numerous other advantages, 

such as the ability of prizes to inspire risk-taking by offering a level playing field through 

credible rules and robust judging mechanisms; to give entrepreneurs and innovators 

license to pursue an endorsed stretch goal that otherwise would have been considered 

overly audacious; and to establish clear success metrics and validation protocols that 

themselves become defining tools for the subject industry or field.

Of course, prizes are not the right tool for every problem. However, prizes can be a 

powerful mechanism if used strategically and systematically within an agency and when 

aligned with a broader strategy for spurring innovation and change. The COMPETES 

prize authority plays a critical role in unleashing that potential. 

2. SUPPORT FOR SCALING THE USE OF PRIZES

Since 2009, the Obama Administration has taken important steps that are helping to

scale the successful use of prizes and challenges across the entire Executive Branch. The 

COMPETES prize authority plays a critical role in the Administration’s work to make 

prizes a standard tool in every agency’s toolbox by granting clear, broad authority to all 

Federal agencies.

In FY 2012, Federal agencies were heterogeneous in their adoption of prizes as an open 

innovation tool. Some agencies, such as NASA (which continued operations of or newly 

 

22 www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2011/12/02_.aspx

23 http://www.innovationinthecrowd.com/examples/orteig-prize.pdf

24 http://space.xprize.org/ansari-x-prize
12

announced over a dozen prizes in FY 2012 under various authorities)25, DOE, and 

Department of Defense (DOD) have a long track record of using prizes due to preexisting agency authorities. Other agencies were early adopters of the COMPETES prize 

authority in FY 2011 and scaled these activities in FY 2012, such as HHS which scaled its

prize activity from two prize programs under COMPETES authority in FY 2011 to 18 

prizes under COMPETES authority in FY 2012.26 Some agencies, such as the Census 

Bureau at DOC, offered their first prize in FY 2012, enabled by the COMPETES authority. 

Other agencies have yet to conduct a prize and are planning for prizes in future years. 

The Administration has laid the policy and legal groundwork to take maximum 

advantage of the new authority in the years to come. Support for agencies in all stages 

of experience with prize design and administration includes:

 Fact Sheet and Frequently Asked Questions: Policy and legal staff in OSTP and 

OMB jointly developed a Fact Sheet and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) 

memorandum, which was issued in August 2011.27 The Fact Sheet offered policy 

and programmatic staff a concise summary of the legislation’s authorities and 

requirements and provided informal guidance to agencies in their 

implementation of the prize authority found in this legislation. To streamline and 

accelerate implementation of the new, government-wide authority, the FAQ 

addressed the questions most frequently raised by agency personnel, including

general counsels, and thereby helped empower agencies to take advantage of 

the authorities in COMPETES, including the authority to conduct prizes up to $50 

million with existing appropriations; to accept private sector funds for the 

design, administration, or prize purse of a competition; to partner with nonprofits and tap the expertise of for-profits for successful implementation; and to 

co-sponsor with another agency.

 Agency Implementation Guidance: Following on the August 2011 Fact Sheet and 

FAQ, and through OSTP’s support, agencies have begun to establish strategies 

and policies to further accelerate widespread use of the new prize authority 

granted to them under COMPETES. HHS has been at the forefront of agency 

 

25 NASA Report to Office of Science and Technology Policy on Prize Competitions for Fiscal Year 

2012, submitted by Mason Peck, NASA Chief Technology Officer, to the Office of Science and 

Technology Policy, December 31, 2012

26 HHS Reports on Prize Competition Activities Conducted in Fiscal Year 2012, submitted by 

Bryan Sivak, HHS Chief Technology Officer, and E.J. Holland Jr., HHS Assistant Secretary for 

Administration, to Dr. John P. Holdren, Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy, 

December 31, 2012

27 Prize Authority in the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act: 

http://www.cio.gov/documents/Prize%20Authority%20in%20the%20America%20COMPETES%2

0Reauthorization%20Act.pdf
13

implementation efforts. On October 12, 2011, Secretary Sebelius issued a 

memorandum notifying the Department of the new COMPETES prize authority, 

outlining the strategy to optimize the use of prize competitions, and calling on 

the heads of operating and staff divisions to forecast their future use of prize 

competitions to stimulate innovation in advancing the agency’s mission. The 

memorandum also highlighted the implementation framework established to 

accelerate the use of well-designed prizes. For example, Secretary Sebelius 

delegated the authority to conduct prize competitions to the Heads of all 

Operating and Staff Divisions. The Department also developed judging 

guidelines, governing principles outlining responsibilities for prize managers, a 

financial management policy for prize competitions, and a vehicle to share best 

practices across the Department. The full set of policy statements, guidance, and 

resources are available online.

28 Other agencies, including EPA, followed HHS’s 

example in FY 2012, establishing agency-wide guidance for prizes conducted 

under the COMPETES authority. 

Agencies such as NASA and USAID have dedicated personnel available to provide 

prize design and implementation assistance to other parts of the agency. For 

example, NASA reports that in FY 2012, the agency created and filled a new 

position, the Prizes and Challenges Program Executive within the Office of the 

Chief Technologist, to coordinate prize strategy for the Agency as a whole.29

Additional agencies are now engaging actively in similar internal review and 

planning related to the prize authority granted under COMPETES.

 General Services Administration Assistance: Section 24(n) of COMPETES called

on the GSA to “develop a contract vehicle to provide agencies relevant products 

and services, including technical assistance in structuring and conducting prize 

competitions to take maximum benefit of the marketplace as they identify and 

pursue prize competitions to further the policy objectives of the Federal 

Government.” In response, GSA launched Sub-Schedule 541 4G, “Challenges and 

Competitions Services”30 in July of 2011, thereby dramatically decreasing the 

amount of time required for agencies to tap the private sector expertise that is 

so critical to early success. To date, 15 contractors have joined Sub-Schedule 541 

4G, offering agencies options for technical assistance, prize platforms, and 

communities of individuals and teams interested in entering prize competitions.

 

28 http://www.hhs.gov/open/initiatives/challenges/

29 NASA Report to Office of Science and Technology Policy on Prize Competitions for Fiscal Year 

2012, submitted by Mason Peck, NASA Chief Technology Officer, to the Office of Science and 

Technology Policy, December 31, 2012

30

http://www.gsaelibrary.gsa.gov/ElibMain/sinDetails.do?scheduleNumber=541&specialItemNum

ber=541+4G&executeQuery=YES
14

In FY 2012, the Sub-Schedule was used for the first time by Federal agencies, 

with increased used planned for in Fiscal Year 2013 (FY 2013). GSA continues to 

inform private-sector vendors and agencies about the schedule and its benefits 

and assist agencies in taking advantage of the available services.

 Government-wide Center of Excellence: In 2011, the Administration launched a 

government-wide Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (COECI) led 

by NASA to provide agencies guidance on all aspects of implementing prize 

competitions: from problem definition, to design of effective monetary and nonmonetary incentives, to post-submission evaluation of solutions. From the 

Centennial Challenges Program, to the NASA Open Innovation Pavilion, to the 

NASA Tournament Lab, NASA is a public-sector leader with breadth and depth of 

experience and experimentation with prizes and challenges. Through COECI,

NASA leverages that expertise across all NASA centers and directorates and helps 

other Federal agencies follow in its footsteps. For select agency pilots conducted 

through inter-agency agreements or through informal support, COECI leverages 

existing NASA open innovation infrastructure to provide a full suite of services —

from prize design, through implementation, to post-prize evaluation — allowing 

agencies to rapidly experiment with these new methods before standing up their 

own capabilities. In addition, COECI captures and communicates best practices, 

case studies, and successful methodologies.

In FY 2012, COECI executed Interagency Agreements with the U.S. Patent and

Trademark Office (USPTO), HHS’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services 

(CMS), the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and USAID. USPTO, CMS, 

and OPM launched application development challenges on the TopCoder 

platform using NASA’s contract with Harvard University. USAID launched two 

idea generation challenges on the InnoCentive platform leveraging NASA’s 

external crowdsourcing contract vehicle to advance their Tech Challenge for 

Atrocity Prevention,31 a partnership with Humanity United. In addition, COECI 

also provided informal guidance to the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) 

Center for Tobacco Products, DOE, and the National Institute of Standards and 

Technology (NIST), among other agencies.

 Training and Capturing Best Practices: OSTP, GSA, and COECI collaborated on a 

variety of training and educational activities in FY 2012 to assist a growing 

community practices of public-sector prize administrators to capture and share 

best practices and lessons learned in prize design and administration. GSA offers 

learning resources about prizes online at HowTo.gov.32 OSTP, GSA, and COECI 

offered Federal agency prize administrators training events and webinars as well. 

 

31 http://thetechchallenge.org/

32 http://www.howto.gov/challenges
15

For example, in June 2012, OSTP, the Case Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, 

and COECI co-hosted the Collaborative Innovation summit on the use of publicsector prizes to spur innovation in the Federal government. The cross-sector 

event brought together hundreds of Federal employees and their private-sector 

and philanthropic partners and counterparts and featured informative 

discussions with Administration officials, private-sector representatives, and 

Federal agencies that have conducted successful prize programs. The event 

resulted in a large amount of case studies and video resources available online.33

As agencies expanded their use of the clear and broad authorities provided to them 

under COMPETES in FY 2012, numerous public-sector prizes and challenges continued to 

be administered under other pre-existing authorities including agency-specific 

authorities; procurement authority such as that provided by the Federal Acquisition 

Regulation (FAR); the authority to award grants, participate in cooperative agreements, 

or both; and authority related to “necessary expense” doctrine, among others. These 

prizes add additional lessons learned and best practices to the growing community of 

practice engaged in public-sector prizes and challenges.

In FY 2013, as agencies complete their internal policies and strategies related to the 

implementation of programs under COMPETES; as more resources for related training of 

agency personnel and for the development, implementation, and promotion of 

challenges become available to agencies through GSA; and as COECI continues to 

provide support for pilot programs at other agencies, the use of the COMPETES prize 

authority will continue to increase, resulting in highly leveraged open innovation 

programs that help agencies address grand challenges and address needs in meeting 

their agency mission. Section 3 and Appendix 1 of this report will focus on the prizes 

developed under the specific prize authority provided by COMPETES. Appendix 2 will 

provide a brief summary of some prizes conducted under authorities, though this report 

is not comprehensive, as agency reporting to OSTP on prizes under authorities other 

than COMPETES is voluntary.

3. HIGHLIGHTS AND TRENDS FROM PRIZES CONDUCTED UNDER COMPETES IN FY

2012

Aided by the policy and legal framework and support for implementation of the new 

prize authority under COMPETES described in Section 2, agencies expanded their use of 

prizes conducted under that authority, with 27 prizes offered by seven agencies in FY 

2012. These competitions provide evidence for how the COMPETES authority is helping

agencies across the Federal government reap the benefits discussed earlier and to 

promote positive innovation and breakthroughs in national priority areas such as health, 

 

33 http://casefoundation.org/collaborative-innovation
16

energy, and employment. A summary of the highlights of FY 2012 activity under 

COMPETES is provided here.34

Driving Innovation in Health IT and Public Health Education

HHS emerged as a leader in implementing prize programs under the COMPETES 

authority in FY 2012, offering 18 prizes and challenges over the year. Four HHS agencies 

conducted prize competitions in FY2012, including the Centers for Disease Control and 

Prevention, National Institutes of Health, and Office of the Secretary. In HHS’s FY 2012

report on use of COMPETES submitted to OSTP, HHS Chief Technology Officer Bryan 

Sivak and HHS Assistant Secretary for Administration E.J. Holland reported that these 

agencies found “prize competitions to be beneficial for advancing the mission of the 

agency and the primary objective of the challenge.” HHS agencies made active use of 

the COMPETES authority to engage in partnerships to support prize funding and 

administration – in fact, 15 of the 18 FY 2012 competitions utilized partnerships with the 

private sector, academia, other federal agencies, or the non-profit sector to support 

aspects of the challenges, including publicity, funding and fundraising, technology and 

technical support, and subject matter expertise.

Investing in Innovation (i2)

The HHS Investing in Innovation (i2) initiative, announced in FY 2011, is a $5 million 

program to spur innovations in Health Information Technology (Health IT). Led by the

Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), the core of 

the $5 million i2 program is a series of prize competitions – up to 15 each year – to 

accelerate innovation and adoption of Health Information Technology (Health IT) for 

improved clinical outcomes and efficient care delivery. ONC and its partners 

administered seven challenges through the i2 program in FY 2012. 

My Air, My Health Challenge

One of the HHS ONC i2 challenges was conducted in partnership with the EPA and the 

National Institute of Environmental and Health Sciences (NIEHS): the “My Air, My Health 

Challenge.”35 Environment and public health are closely related and complementary 

fields — and their future depends on a closer understanding of those connections. New 

portable sensors have the potential to transform the way Federal agencies and the 

private sector measure and interpret the influence of pollution on health. These 

technologies can provide a picture that is detailed and personal, with dramatic 

implications for health care, air quality oversight, and individuals’ control over their own 

environments and health. The EPA and HHS envision a future in which powerful, 

 

34 See the Appendix for a detailed account of all FY 2012 activities under COMPETES.

35 https://www.innocentive.com/ar/challenge/9932947
17

affordable, and portable sensors provide a rich awareness of environmental quality, 

moment-to-moment physiological changes, and long-term health outcomes. Healthcare 

will be connected to the whole environment, improving diagnosis, treatment, and 

prevention at all levels. Many of the first steps toward this future have already been 

taken. Prototype projects have developed portable air quality and physiologic sensors, 

and experimental analysis tools for handling data that is higher in quantity, but often 

lower in quality, than more traditional monitoring techniques. The “My Air, My Health 

Challenge” was designed to build on this foundation. Challenge organizers sought 

solutions that integrate data from portable physiological and air quality monitors, 

producing a combined picture that is meaningful and usable.

The challenge was a multidisciplinary call to innovators and software developers to 

enable near real time, location-specific monitoring and reporting of air pollutants and 

potentially related physiological parameters, using a personal and portable integrated 

system to assess connections between the two. The system needed to link air-pollutant 

concentrations with physiological data, provide geo-coded and time-stamped files in an 

easy-to-use format, and transmit this data via existing networks to a central data 

repository provided by EPA and HHS.

The challenge was an integral part of the joint effort by HHS and EPA to find nextgeneration solutions in the area of environmental and health sensor technologies and 

exploring the interaction of environment and health through granular, near-real-time 

data collection. Grants or contracts were not appropriate because the agencies sought a 

variety of different ideas rather than having to select one approach based only on a 

proposal. In addition, the challenge afforded opportunities to communicate both 

agencies’ interest in this topic to encourage private-sector research and development.

Phase 1 of the competition was still open as of the close of FY 2012. Full competition 

results will be reported in the FY 2013 report to Congress. The challenge stimulated 

interest in the topic from a wide range of individuals and institutions including large 

companies, universities, athletics suppliers, and lone innovators. This demonstrates that 

the challenge mechanism is a viable platform for agency collaboration around a topic of 

mutual interest. The creation of the actual prototypes based on the finalists’ proposals 

will be a key component in evaluating the success of the challenge.

Reducing Hospital Readmissions for Patients

Another ONC i2 challenge36 asked software developers to create an easy-to-use webbased tool to make post-discharge follow-up appointment scheduling an effective 

process for care providers, patients, and caregivers. Nearly one in five patients from a 

 

36 http://www.health2con.com/devchallenge/discharge-follow-up-appointment-challenge/
18

hospital will be readmitted within 30 days. A large proportion of readmissions can be 

prevented by improving communications and coordinating care before and after 

discharge from the hospital. 

Research has shown that scheduling follow-up appointments and post-discharge testing 

before a patient is discharged is one of the critical elements of a safe and effective 

transition. Most patients across the country continue to leave the hospital without 

confirmed appointments and many providers remain frustrated by a highly manual and 

unreliable system. A growing number of innovative consumer-facing tools are becoming 

available for patients and care givers to schedule appointments and rate providers. 

However, these tools have not yet reached high levels of adoption within communities, 

and to date have not targeted the appointment scheduling needs of patients, caregivers,

and providers at the point of discharge from a hospital.

Entrants to the challenge were asked to integrate inpatient data effectively and provide 

structured support for self-care; integrate design and usability concepts to drive patient 

and provider adoption and engagement; demonstrate innovative uses of mobile 

technologies; and demonstrate potential to improve health outcomes.

Entrants submitted numerous new easy-to-use tools37 that have the potential to reduce 

patient readmissions through effective appointment scheduling, leading to improved 

patient health and reduced health care costs. The top submissions included easy-to-use, 

synchronized scheduling tools for providers, consumers, and caretakers while also 

providing assorted other functionalities that appeal to different types of stakeholders, 

including integration with multi-purpose patient portals, appointment transportation 

coordination, and automated reminders. The winning application, MyHealthDIRECT, is a 

web-based solution that effectively matches the demand for health care appointments 

with a supply of actual appointment slots.

Engaging Citizen Solvers in Energy Challenges

DOE offered several competitions in FY 2012 that challenged citizens and business to 

create innovative new solutions to clean energy challenges. 

Apps for Energy

DOE’s Apps for Energy competition offered $100,000 in prizes to software developers 

for the best new applications (apps) that help utility customers make the most out of 

their Green Button electricity usage data. Green Button is an open standard for sharing 

electricity data that is available to millions of utility customers, and combining Green 

Button data with other public data sources can help homeowners and businesses take 

 

37 http://www.health2con.com/devchallenge/discharge-follow-up-appointment-challenge/
19

action, understand energy usage, and make better-informed decisions. This competition 

sought to inspire innovative use of Green Button data, and a prize allowed DOE to 

leverage private-sector effort without predefining or limiting the solution set. 

Additionally, competitions have an existing following among the community of 

independent software developers, a key target community for DOE’s goal of creating an 

active energy–focused developer community. Finally, the competition provided an 

opportunity to raise awareness of the existence and value of Green Button data. 

The competition resulted in more than 50 submissions, and the discussion boards on 

Challenge.gov were heavily used during the competition, both indications of the 

beginning of an active developer community. Additionally, the winning apps show three

diverse and valuable approaches to using Green Button data and two of the three top 

apps have either been used to found a company or have since been acquired by another 

company. An established company that was making its first foray into using Green 

Button data submitted the third app. The competition itself attracted over 12,000 

followers.

DOE challenge organizers partnered formally with private-sector companies GRID21, 

PG&E, and Itron to sponsor the prize purse. These partners provided monetary and 

marketing and outreach support. Challenge organizers partnered informally with a great 

number of organizations to improve their outreach abilities, including the App 

Developers Alliance, Code for America, Innocentive, EPA, DOC, and various educational 

organizations.

SunShot Prize: Race to the Rooftops

In September 2012, DOE launched an audacious new market stimulation prize in 

support of the goals of its SunShot Grand Challenge, which aims to make solar 

competitive with fossil fuels by the end of the decade. The $10 million SunShot Prize38

challenges the ingenuity of America’s businesses and communities to make it faster, 

easier, and cheaper to install rooftop solar energy systems. Successful competitors will 

deploy at least 6,000 new rooftop photovoltaic installations in the U.S. at an average 

pre-subsidy non-hardware cost of $1 per watt. Winners will break this significant price 

barrier, considered to be unachievable a decade ago, and prove that they can 

repeatedly achieve a $1 per watt non-hardware cost using innovative, verifiable 

processes and business practices. The winners of the first phase of the competition will 

be announced in FY 2015 with cash awards likely to be made in 2016.

Despite unprecedented cost reductions for solar hardware over recent years, the total 

price to install and commission residential and small-commercial scale solar energy 

systems remains high. Designing and implementing practices that enable dramatic 

 

38 http://challenge.gov/DOE/410-sunshot-prize
20

reductions in the associated non-hardware costs of solar is now the greatest challenge 

to achieving national targets for attaining cost-competitive solar by 2020. 

DOE has three main goals for Race to the Rooftops challenge:

 Affordability: Improve the affordability of residential and small commercial 

rooftop solar systems by breaking a significant price barrier for non-hardware 

costs, considered impossible a decade ago. Hardware costs have fallen more 

than 75% since 2008, the non-hardware costs have not made as significant of an 

advance. The goal of this prize is to help the community achieve lower all in costs 

to the consumer by cutting through much of the red tape.

 Solar Market Maturity: Inspire U.S. businesses and communities to create the 

right market conditions for growth and job creation. 

 Subsidy Independence: Help the private sector transition to post-subsidy market 

while maintaining strong growth and resilience. 

DOE has partnered formally with the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at 

State University of New York at Albany, to promote and provide ongoing outreach 

activities for the prize. Based on the feedback, inquires, and comments received to date, 

challenge organizers think there is a great interest in the solar community in this new 

market stimulation prize.

New Solutions for Entrepreneurs, Job-Seekers, and Small Businesses

DOL and SBA offered competitions to create applications that would leverage open 

government data and benefit entrepreneurs, job-seekers, and small businesses. Two 

apps challenges from DOL are summarized here. 

Equal Pay App Challenge

Through the Equal Pay App Challenge, the National Equal Pay Task Force and DOL

engaged innovators, educators, and IT developers to help build innovative tools to 

educate the public about the gender pay gap and promote equal pay for women. Nearly 

50 years after President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, women are still paid less 

than their male counterparts for doing comparable jobs. This pay gap means that each 

time the average woman starts a new job, she is likely to start from a lower base salary, 

and that, over time, the pay gap between her and her male colleagues is likely to grow. 

For the average working woman, the pay gap means she will receive $150 less in her 

weekly paycheck, $8,000 less at the end of the year, and $380,000 less over her lifetime. 

For women of color and women with disabilities, the disparity is even bigger.

Through the challenge, DOL engaged leaders in academia, non-profit organizations, 

industry innovators, IT professionals, and other equal pay supporters to use publicly 
21

available labor data and other online resources to educate users about the pay gap and 

develop tools to promote equal pay. DOL’s four primary goals were to provide greater 

access to pay data by gender, race, and ethnicity; provide tools for early career 

coaching; improve education on negotiation; and promote online mentoring. Private 

sector partners for the challenge included Women Innovate Mobile, Carnegie Mellon 

University, Google, The Daily Muse, Salary.com, Interview Street, and the Massachusetts 

Institute of Technology (MIT). 

The Equal Pay App Challenge on Challenge.gov advanced DOL’s mission by leveraging 

existing program information, technology, and public innovation to raise awareness on 

equal pay and provide effective tools for employers and employees. The competition 

amplified the Equal Pay Taskforce’s mission on wage equality by expanding the amount 

of quality online tools, effective messaging, and partnerships with non-traditional 

stakeholders in the academic and digital spectrum. The competition was featured on 

multiple media outlets including Forbes, The Daily Muse, New York Times, and 

Sacramento Bee, in addition to other online publications and mainstream blogs. 

Disability Employment App Challenge

This challenge asked developers to help build innovative tools to improve employment 

opportunities and outcomes for people with disabilities. Nearly twenty-two years after 

the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act and thirty-nine years after the 

passage of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 – two of the most significant disability 

employment-related pieces of legislation in American history – people with disabilities 

continue to be employed at much lower levels than the general population. Not only do 

people with disabilities have a significantly higher unemployment rate than the general 

population, they also have a much lower labor force participation rate. For minorities 

with disabilities, these disparities are even greater. This represents a significant loss of 

willing and able talent to the American workforce, loss of income for people without 

jobs, and economic loss to the country. In this challenge, DOL leveraged technology in 

innovative ways to promote recruitment resources for employers, develop job-training 

and skill-building tools for job seekers, facilitate employment-related transportation 

options, and expand web and Information Communication Technology accessibility.

Three category prizes were awarded for innovation, public voting, and accessibility: 

 Innovation Award Winner: Access Jobs is a job search portal specifically designed 

for job seekers with disabilities. The website implements usable accessibility 

techniques, such as responsive design, which allow the website to be 

experienced in the same way across all platforms. 

 The People’s Choice Award Winner: VoisPal is an Android-based app designed to 

help people with speech difficulties. 
22

 Above and Beyond Accessibility Award Winner: Accelerated Dynamic Content: 

(AccDC) is a scalable, cross-browser, and cross-platform compatible Dynamic 

Content Management System that automates the rendering of dynamic content 

to ensure accessibility for screen reader and keyboard-only users.

CONCLUSION

Prizes have an impressive track record of spurring innovation in the private and 

philanthropic sectors. More than 45 Federal agencies, departments, and bureaus 

conducted over 200 prizes by September 2012, including 27 competitions conducted by 

seven agencies under the COMPETES prize authority in FY 2012. These agencies have

reaped the rewards of well-designed prizes integrated into a broader innovation 

strategy. The successes of these public-sector prizes show what can be expected from 

more Federal agencies as they develop the expertise and capacity to use prizes 

strategically and systematically to advance their core mission.

The COMPETES prize authority is a critical step toward making prizes a standard tool in 

every agency’s toolbox. By expanding the authority of all Federal agencies to conduct 

prize competitions and by giving agencies a clear legal path, the legislation makes it 

easier for agencies to use prizes and enables agencies to pursue more ambitious prizes 

with robust incentives.

The Administration has laid the policy and legal groundwork for agencies to continue to 

take advantage of the new prize authority in the years to come and has set up support 

for agencies, such as training events and resources, GSA’s contact vehicle that decreases

the amount of time required for agencies to tap private sector expertise, and the 

government-wide Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation through which NASA 

supports the design and implementation of pilot prize programs for other Federal 

agencies. A number of agencies have begun to establish specific strategies and policies 

to further accelerate widespread use of the COMPETES prize authority throughout their 

organization.

As the Administration expands the foundation of support for the widespread use of the 

COMPETES prize authority, prizes conducted under the authority unleashed significant 

new activity in national priority areas such as energy, health, and employment. 

Continued and increased use of the authority in the years to come will allow agencies 

across the Federal government to reap the benefits of high-impact prizes for open 

innovation in the years to come.
23

APPENDIX 1: AGENCY PROGRAMS CONDUCTED UNDER THE AMERICA COMPETES

REAUTHORIZATION ACT OF 2010

This Appendix provides a complete summary of all prizes and challenges conducted in FY

2012 under the prize authority provided to agencies in COMPETES and does not include 

any of the multiple prize competitions conducted under other authorities in FY 2012 or 

prior. 

LIST OF CHALLENGES

1. Department of Commerce

1.1. Census Return Rate Challenge

2. Department of Energy

2.1. National Clean Energy Business Plan Competition

2.2. Apps for Energy

2.3. SunShot Prize

3. Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Health and Human Services

3.1. My Air, My Health Challenge

4. Department of Health and Human Services

4.1. SMART-Indivo Challenge

4.2. EHR Accessibility Module Challenge

4.3. Discharge Follow-up Appointment Challenge

4.4. Reporting Patient Safety Events Challenge

4.5. popHealth Tool Development Challenge

4.6. One in a Million Hearts Challenge

4.7. What’s in your Health Record Video Challenge

4.8. Managing Meds Video Challenge

4.9. Healthy People 2020 Leading Health Indicators App Challenge

4.10. Beat Down Blood Pressure Video Challenge

4.11. Health New Year Challenge

4.12. Design by Biomedical Undergraduate Teams (Debut) Challenge

4.13. Now Trending: #Health in My Community

4.14. 2012 Surgeon General’s Video Contest: Tobacco – I’m Not Buying It

4.15. Surgeon General’s Healthy Apps Challenge

4.16. Seeing My World Through a Safer Lens Video Challenge

4.17. Million Hearts Caregiver Video Challenge

5. Department of Labor

5.1. Equal Pay App Challenge

5.2. Disability Employment App Challenge
24

6. Department of State

6.1. Innovation in Arms Control Challenge

7. Small Business Administration

7.1. National Small Business Week Video Contest

7.2. Apps for Entrepreneurs Competition

DETAILED CHALLENGE REPORTS

1. Department of Commerce

1.1. Census Return Rate Challenge

Overview: The U.S. Census Bureau conducted a prize competition that challenged 

statisticians, mathematicians, and other data scientists to analyze Census data in order 

to create a statistical model to predict Decennial Census mail return rates at the Census 

block group level of geography. In order to improve the response rate in the future, 

Census planners need to develop appropriate strategies to gain the greatest amount of 

respondent cooperation for efficient data collection. The results of this prize will be 

used in modeling for the decennial census and demographic sample surveys. 

Website: 

http://www.kaggle.com/c/us-census-challenge

Problem Statement: Over the last two decades, the Census Bureau has seen a decline in 

cooperation rates with Decennial Censuses and ongoing surveys. The Census Bureau 

conducted a prize competition capitalizing on the expertise of data scientists to improve 

upon or provide different methodologies in creating a predictive statistical model on 

Census mail return rates that help the agency plan and design more efficient Censuses 

and surveys. The Census Bureau provided participants with a public use statistical 

dataset comprised of 2010 Census and the 5-year American Community Survey 

estimates (the Census Planning Database). To succeed, models had to be successful, it 

must have maintained accuracy in its predictions when tested by officials with a 

validation dataset that was not available to the participants. 

Goal: The competition’s primary objective was to obtain a better statistical model for 

predicting return rates at the block group level. This predictive model aids Census 

planners in better developing and improving upon strategies to contact and gain 

respondent coordination for timely and efficient data collection. 

Why a Prize as Preferred Method: The Census Bureau chose to conduct a prize 

competition instead of utilizing other acquisition methods because the Kaggle online 
25

platform provided the Bureau with a large variety of data scientists that would have 

been difficult to tap through traditional contract, grant, or cooperative agreement 

approaches. Census wanted to move beyond the usual suspects and involve a large

variety of data scientists with varying levels of expertise to maximize innovation and 

receive as many different methods and models as possible.

Participants: The competition targeted statisticians, mathematicians, and other data 

scientists experienced in dealing with large amounts of data and statistical models.

Participation was open to all members of the Kaggle community who agreed to the 

terms and conditions set forth by the Census Bureau and Kaggle. There were 291 total 

participants. Of these participants, 244 were teams ranging in size from one to four 

members. Participants were located worldwide in countries including Australia, Czech 

Republic, and India, as well as throughout the United States.

Timeline: On August 31, 2012, the competition launched and remained open through 

November 1, 2012. A separate data visualization competition began on November 1, 

2012 and lasted through November 11, 2012.

Solicitation and Outreach Methods and Results: Prior to the launch of the competition, 

the Census Bureau widely advertised the upcoming competition in order to mobilize 

potential participants. These efforts varied but included: Census Bureau personnel 

creating and distributing flyers at the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) of the American 

Statistical Association’s annual conference in San Diego; announcing the competition at 

a JSM roundtable luncheon and an invited session; creating a specialized web page and 

slider on the Census Bureau public facing website; a public announcement in the Federal 

Register; and advertisement on the Kaggle website itself. The Census Bureau found 

these methods to be highly effective and was extremely pleased with the level of 

participation received. The Census Bureau will utilize these same solicitation and 

outreach methods in any similar, future outreach efforts.

Incentives: The total available prize money was $25,000 (first place $14,000, second 

place $7,500, third place $2,500, and data visualization competition $1,000).

Evaluation: The Kaggle website’s Leaderboard kept track of each entrant’s score and 

comparative rank based on the predicted results in the entry and ground truth of a 

validation dataset. At the close of the competition, scores were calculated from the 

predicted results and ground truth in the testing dataset. The Top 3 eligible entrants on 

the Private Leaderboard were declared as the prize winners.

Resources: A team of three people at Census oversaw the competition.

Results: The competition advanced the mission of the Census Bureau in several ways.

First, the winning team's models used statistical methods not previously utilized by the 

agency. All three top models made use of a class of voting or committee method that 
26

fall under the heading of "Statistical Machine Learning" techniques. These methods 

have a very high profile in statistics and are typically applied in computer science.

Census Bureau statisticians had not used this method before when modeling Census 

mail return rates andas a result of the competition, the Census Bureau will pursue this 

promising technique. Second, the challenge introduced the Census Planning Database to 

a new and diverse audience of data users, such as software engineers and university 

students focusing in information sciences and technology. Given these outcomes, 

challenge organizers consider the challenge to have been a success and plan to study 

and apply the winning model techniques and methods as they plan for Census 2020.

2. Department of Energy

2.1. National Clean Energy Business Plan Competition 

Overview: The DOE’s National Clean Energy Business Plan Competition (NCEBPC) is 

designed to build regional networks of student-focused business creation competitions 

across the country. Six regional organizations hold clean energy business plan 

competitions, and the competition culminates in the six regional winners competing for 

a National Grand Prize of $100,000. 

Website:

http://techportal.eere.energy.gov/commercialization/natlbizplan.html

Problem Statement: The NCEBPC aims to inspire clean energy innovation across the 

country by creating businesses from best in-class technology research while inspiring 

and cultivating America’s next generation of entrepreneurs to drive those businesses 

forward. Six regional DOE-funded business plan competitions send a finalist to 

Washington, D.C. to compete for the Grand Prize in DOE’s National Competition.

All business plan proposals must fall within DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and 

Renewable Energy (EERE) mission and technology portfolio. DOE established guidelines 

that defined regional NCEBPC competitions. Regional competitions are encouraged to 

communicate and collaborate with other regional organizers in order expand network 

connections. 

As a program whose goals include the development of the next generation of 

entrepreneurs, NCEBPC requires that students be highly involved in each competition’s 

management and execution – at least 50% of any participating team’s team members 

must be actively enrolled in an accredited U.S. university or college. 

DOE promotes openness and transparency by requiring all competition entrants to 

disclose the status of all intellectual property (IP) used in the competitions.

Competitions must demonstrate an effort to cultivate and recruit business plans based 

on technologies derived from U.S. universities or national labs. To ensure a level playing 

field among business plan teams nationwide, all entrants must be early stage venture 
27

investments and may not have equity capital totaling more than $200,000 prior to 

selection of regional winners. Student members of the formal team must have 

combined minimum equity of 20% of the company.

Goal: The DOE has created the NCEBPC and funded the regional competitions with 

several goals in mind:

 Inspire students to engage in clean energy entrepreneurship.

 Build regional networks through the competitions that create linkages between 

technologists, academics, and investors.

 Enable the launch of innovative cleantech startups by providing seed funding and inkind services to young entrepreneurs.

 Advance clean energy technologies by engaging students, innovators, and 

technologists to bring innovative technologies to market.

Why a Prize as Preferred Method: The NCEBPC seeks to bridge the investor, technology,

and academic communities by inspiring cleantech entrepreneurship in students. By 

working with the private sector, through in-kind sponsorships, cash prizes, and having 

the business and investor community serve as judges and mentors, the competition 

brings together the communities in a way that could not be done through a grant alone. 

The DOE funded the regional competitions through a competitive grant solicitation;

however, each region must raise funds on their own to support the competitions. The 

National Grand Prize, however, is solely funded by private-sector partners. The final 

national phase brings together the regions. 

Participants: The NCEBPC’s primary target audience is graduate and undergraduate 

students in U.S. universities and colleges. The competition, through its six regions, 

received 299 eligible submissions from teams in its first year. The six regional winners 

participated in the National portion of the competition. Teams must go through the 

regional competition process in order to compete in the National Grand Prize. 

Timeline: The NCEBPC was launched in 2011, with the inaugural competition taking 

place in June of 2012. The grant is for three years for the regions; however, each region 

must make their competition sustainable beyond the grant period. The DOE aims to 

make the NCEBPC an annual event beyond 2014. For the applications, each regional 

competition sets its own deadlines. Most of the applications are due between late 

December and early March. Each competition must hold their final round of selection 

for their winner by early May. The National Competition takes place in June. The 2012 

Competition took place June 11-13, 2012 in Washington, DC. 

Solicitation and Outreach Methods and Results: The NCEBPC utilized many forms of 

media to disseminate information about the prize. These included social media, 

traditional press, http://energy.gov/ through the EERE and Secretary’s blog, and 

Challenge.gov. Each of the regions has their own outreach strategy as well. The DOE will 
28

be pairing up with more associations and other groups to disseminate information 

about the National and regional competitions. 

Incentives: The National Competition incentive is a $100,000 prize, provided by Wells 

Fargo. For the 2012 Competition, the cash prize was distributed to the winning team 

through the Clean Energy Alliance (CEA); the funds were not transferred to or through

DOE. Other prizes for the 2012 Competition included technical, analytical, and business 

support selected and offered to help the teams after the competition to help them 

connect to the investor communities, providing legal and advisory services, and give 

them resources to expose their technology to the greater cleantech community. These 

resources and services included:

 Technical and commercialization support provided by the National Renewable 

Energy Laboratory (NREL)

 Access and office space at NREL’s Colorado Center for Renewable Energy Economic 

Development (CREED)

 Access to NREL’s Venture Capital Advisory Network

 Advisory services from Battelle Ventures tailored to specific technology and business 

needs

 Technical and commercialization assistance provided by one of CEA’s 18 incubators 

depending on individual business needs, and geography

 Participation in the NREL Industry Growth Forum and The Cleantech Open

 Profile of technology and business case on EERE’s Energy Innovation Portal

Evaluation: While the regions can determine their own judging criteria, the National 

Competition adheres to these judging criteria: 

 Solutions/Products (30%): (1) the value a solution/product can deliver to customers, 

(2) clear and convincing description of the market differentiation for the solution, 

and (3) technical feasibility.

 Go-To-Market Plan (30%): (1) ability to demonstrate evidence of customer 

valuation/validation, (2) prove to the best of their ability that the business is 

scalable.

 Team Plan (20%): (1) how well the team is positioned to successfully carry out their 

business plans, (2) commitment to enterprise, and (3) gaps that currently exist in the 

organization and action plan to fill the gaps.

 Impact on EERE Mission (20%): (1) how the solution/product will strengthen the 

economy, protect the environment, and reduce dependence on foreign oil; and (2)

identification of which of the eleven areas of EERE’s mission space will benefit from 

the solution/product: Renewable Energy (Solar, Wind, Water, Biomass, Geothermal, 

Hydrogen and Fuel Cells) and Energy Efficiency (Homes, Buildings, Vehicles, 

Manufacturing, and Government).

Partnerships: The U.S. DOE NCEBPC partnered formally with Wells Fargo, NREL, Mintz 

Levin & ML Strategies, the Clean Energy Alliance (CEA), Battelle Ventures, Cleanlaunch, 
29

and The Cleantech Open. Additionally, their Federal partners included the DOC and 

OSTP.

Resources: No other DOE appropriations were used for the National Competition. The 

regional competitions are a $2.1M 3-year competitive grant program.

Results: The NCEBPC engaged multiple stakeholders at both the national and the 

regional level. More than 300 teams were involved in 2012 NCEBPC, with more than 

250+ attendees at the national event. As a result of the competition, as of November 

2012, reported metrics include:

 More than 52 startups incorporated

 55 patents and disclosures have been filed

 31+ FTEs created

2.2. Apps for Energy

Overview: DOE’s Apps for Energy offered $100,000 to software developers for the best 

new apps that help the public make the most of Green Button electricity usage data.

Website:

http://appsforenergy.challenge.gov/

Problem Statement: DOE’s Apps for Energy competition offered $100,000 in prizes to 

software developers for the best new apps that help utility customers make the most 

out of their Green Button39 electricity usage data. Green Button is an open standard for 

sharing electricity data that is available to millions of utility customers, and combining 

Green Button data with other public data sources can help homeowners and businesses 

take action, understand energy usage, and make better-informed decisions. 

Goal: DOE had three goals for the Apps for Energy competition:

 Increase the value of Green Button data for residential and commercial utility 

customers by providing new tools for analyzing, viewing, reducing, and sharing their 

electricity usage

 Encourage the creation of innovative apps with commercial potential by individuals, 

startups, and small organizations

 Create an active and energy-focused developer community

Why a Prize as Preferred Method: This competition sought to inspire innovative use of 

Green Button data, and a prize allowed DOE to leverage private-sector effort without 

predefining the types of applications DOE would like to see. Additionally, competitions 

have an existing following among the community of independent software developers, a 

 

39 http://collaborate.nist.gov/twiki-sggrid/bin/view/SmartGrid/GreenButtonInitiative
30

key target community for DOE’s goal of creating an active energy–focused developer 

community. Finally, the competition itself provided an opportunity to raise awareness of 

the existence and value of Green Button data.

Participants: The primary target audiences were developers who are not already 

engaged in the energy sector and developers who are engaged in the energy sector but 

are not familiar with the Green Button format. The competition received 56 eligible 

submissions from individuals, small teams, and large organizations. Small teams were 

the most common, followed by individual entries.

Timeline:

Submission Period Began: April 5, 2012

Submission Period Ended: May 15, 2012

Judging Began: May 17, 2012

Judging Ended: May 21, 2012

Public Voting Ended: May 31, 2012

Solicitation and Outreach Methods and Results: Challenge organizers used an extensive 

public engagement campaign focused on targeted outreach to prominent tech and 

energy influencers on Twitter, as well as on Facebook to a lesser extent. Challenge 

organizers also managed to get a number of stories about the competition in online 

technology and energy press. Energy.gov and Challenge.gov were used as hubs for 

frequent competition updates and active support, so that competition followers were 

more likely to submit high quality work. Finally, challenge organizers worked with a 

number of professional organizations to alert their memberships.

Incentives: The primary incentive was $100,000 in prize money. $50,000 was provided 

by the Office for Electricity and Energy Reliability and $25,000 was provided each by 

PG&E and Itron. For the non-monetary incentives, each winner was included in the 2012 

Energy Datapalooza event and their app was featured on Energy.gov.

Evaluation: The judging panel consisted of experts and managers from DOE, the 

sponsoring organizations, other Federal agencies, and the software design and 

development industry, and selected the Best Overall App and Student Award based 

upon the following criteria:

 Impact: Strength of the submission’s potential to help individuals, organizations, and 

communities make informed decisions about their electricity use.

 Creativity and Innovation: Degree of new thinking the submission brings to 

applications for the energy sector, and the creativity shown in designing for impact.

 Implementation: The submission’s user experience and interactive capabilities, with 

preference given to applications that are easily accessible to a range of consumers, 

including those with disabilities.
31

A preliminary panel of judges selected by DOE initially screened submissions. The 

preliminary panel conducted an initial screening of the apps for eligibility and verified 

that the apps worked as advertised in the descriptions. The finalists were then passed to 

the judges for ranking. Each judge ranked the apps independently and the rankings were 

combined to determine the winner.

Partnerships: Challenge organizers partnered formally with GRID21, PG&E, and Itron to 

sponsor the prize. They provided monetary and marketing and outreach support. 

Challenge organizers partnered informally with a great number of organizations to 

improve their outreach abilities, including the App Developers Alliance, Code for 

America, Innocentive, EPA, DOC, and various educational organizations.

Resources: In addition to the prize money, the competition required $2,000 in additional 

funding, used to customize the website and employ ChallengePost to vet the validity of 

users participating in the Popular Choice Award vote.

Results: The competition resulted in a large number of submissions, and the discussion 

boards on Challenge.gov were heavily used during the competition, both indications of 

the beginning of an active developer community. Additionally, the winning apps show 3 

diverse and valuable approaches to using Green Button data and 2 of the 3 top apps 

have either been used to found a company or have since been acquired by another 

company. An established company that was making its first foray into using Green 

Button data submitted the third app. The competition itself attracted over 12,000 

followers.

2.3. SunShot Prize: Race to the Rooftops

Overview: DOE’s $10 million SunShot Prize challenges the ingenuity of America’s 

businesses and communities to make it faster, easier, and cheaper to install rooftop 

solar energy systems. Successful competitors will deploy domestically and in two 

phases, at least 6,000 new rooftop photovoltaic installations at an average pre-subsidy 

non-hardware cost of $1 per watt. Winners will break this significant price barrier, 

considered to be unachievable a decade ago, and prove that they can repeatedly 

achieve a $1 per watt non-hardware cost using innovative, verifiable processes and 

business practices.

Website:

http://challenge.gov/DOE/410-sunshot-prize

Problem Statement: Despite unprecedented cost reductions for solar hardware over 

recent years, the total price to install and commission residential and small-commercial 

scale solar energy systems remains high. Designing and implementing practices that 

enable reductions in the associated non-hardware costs of solar is now the greatest 

challenge to achieving national targets for attaining cost-competitive solar by 2020.
32

Goal: DOE has three main goals for Race to the Rooftops challenge:

 Affordability: Improve the affordability of residential and small commercial rooftop 

solar systems by breaking a significant price barrier for non-hardware costs, 

considered impossible a decade ago. Hardware costs have fallen more than 75% 

since 2008, the non-hardware costs have not made as significant of an advance. The 

goal of this prize is to help the community achieve lower all in costs to the consumer 

by cutting through much of the red tape.

 Solar Market Maturity: Inspire U.S. businesses and communities to create the right 

market conditions for growth and job creation.

 Subsidy Independence: Help the private sector transition to post-subsidy market 

while maintaining strong growth and resilience.

Why a Prize as Preferred Method: The SunShot Prize not only rewards for results in cost 

effective ways, it increases the number and the diversity of individuals, organizations, 

and teams that are addressing this problem. In addition, DOE expects the industry 

overall to invent and deploy new business concepts and models during a period of two 

years. This will help all market players, not only the best, to participate, excel, and 

improve while focusing on their core value proposition to end consumers.

Participants: The target audiences are teams consisting of numerous organizations such 

as solar developers, installers (large and small), state and local governments, utilities, 

property owners/managers, new housing builders, home service providers, trade 

associations, and new market entrants. The prize is open to all U.S. citizens or 

permanent residents and to all public and private organizations such as a private or 

publicly traded company or an institution of higher education, an association, or other 

nonprofit organization, that maintains the U.S. as a primary place of business.

Timeline:

Registration to compete period begins: 9/12/2012

Submission period begins: 12/31/2012

Registration to compete deadline: 10/31/2014

Pre-submission assessment period ends: 11/30/2014

Phase I Prize submission deadline: 12/31/2014

Phase II Prize submission deadline: 12 months after Phase I submission

Anticipated date for announcing Phase I winners: Summer 2015

Anticipated Date for awarding Phase II cash awards: Spring 2016

Solicitation and Outreach Methods and Results: Challenge organizers have been 

applying a targeted engagement campaign using webinars, email blasts, blog posts, and 

web updates that target tens of thousands of people and organizations. Challenge 

organizers also managed to get a number of press releases about the competition in 

online technology, media, and energy press. The SunShot Initiative website, Energy.gov,

and Challenge.gov were used as hubs for frequent competition updates and active 

support to potential contenders. Challenge organizers have partnered with the College 
33

of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at State University of New York at Albany (CNSE), 

to promote and provide ongoing outreach through annual workshops dedicate to the 

SunShot Prize and its potential contenders. 

Incentives: The primary incentive is a $10,000,000 total cash award given to three 

winning teams. In addition, winners will have rights to use the title “SunShot Prize 

Winner.” The first team will have the rights to the title “SunShot Prize Winner of 

America’s Most Affordable Rooftop Solar.”

Evaluation: DOE will establish by 2014 an Evaluation Review Committee (ERC) composed 

of Federal and non-Federal subject matter experts, including third-party organizations, 

to review entries submitted under this competition and determine winners. In addition, 

DOE will use a third-party auditing firm to conduct extensive technical and financial 

evaluations in order to assist the ERC in making its selections. There are three main 

criteria in judging applications: 

1. Technical Field Assessment: Examiners will review evidence of installation 

qualification and compliance with requirements. Examiners may conduct random 

on-site visits to verify submitted records by applicants. 

2. Financial and Accounting Assessment: Examiners will perform a complete audit to 

determine financial propriety of submissions. Auditors will review all financial 

transactions, accounting procedures, internal controls, financial terms, and financial 

reporting systems.

3. Business Sustainability: Examiners will evaluate the sustainability of teams’ business 

models to deploy solar in subsidy-free U.S. markets. Future installations must be 

feasible without subsidies or rebates at average non-hardware costs of $1/W or less.

Partnerships: Challenge organizers partnered formally with the College of Nanoscale 

Science and Engineering at State University of New York at Albany to promote and 

provide ongoing outreach activities.

Resources: In addition to the $10,000,000 prize money, the competition requires 

roughly $50,000 annually to fund and support outreach activities.

Results: DOE released the SunShot Prize: Race to the Rooftops in September 2012. 

Based on the feedback, inquires, and comments received through formal 

communication channels and based on the number webinar attendance, challenge 

organizers think there is a great interest in the solar community in this challenge.
34

3. Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Health and Human Services

3.1. My Air, My Health Challenge

Overview: Environment and public health are closely related and complementary 

fields—and their future depends on a closer understanding of those connections. New 

portable sensors have the potential to transform the way challenge organizers measure 

and interpret the influence of pollution on health. These technologies can provide a 

picture that is more detailed and more personal, with dramatic implications for health 

care, air quality oversight, and individuals’ control over their own environments and 

health. The EPA and HHS — including NIEHS and ONC — envision a future in which 

powerful, affordable, and portable sensors provide a rich awareness of environmental 

quality, moment-to-moment physiological changes, and long-term health outcomes.

Healthcare will be connected to the whole environment, improving diagnosis, 

treatment, and prevention at all levels. Many of the first steps toward this future have 

already been taken. Prototype projects have developed portable air quality and 

physiologic sensors, and experimental analysis tools for handling data that is higher in

quantity, but often lower in quality, than more traditional monitoring techniques. The 

“My Air, My Health Challenge” was designed to build on this foundation. Challenge 

organizers sought solutions that integrate data from portable physiological and air 

quality monitors, producing a combined picture that is meaningful and usable.

Website:

https://www.innocentive.com/ar/challenge/9932947

Problem Statement: The challenge was a multidisciplinary call to innovators and 

software developers to enable near real time, location-specific monitoring and reporting 

of air pollutants and potentially related physiological parameters, using a personal/ 

portable integrated system to assess connections between the two. The system needed 

to link air-pollutant concentrations with physiological data, provide geo-coded and timestamped files in an easy-to-use format, and transmit this data via existing networks to a 

central data repository provided by EPA and HHS.

Goal: The challenge was structured in 2 phases: 

Phase 1 – Project Plan

In Phase 1, entrants needed to:

 Propose a plausible link between health outcomes and airborne pollutants (chemical 

species and/or particulates), and provide evidence to support a plausible and 

physiologically meaningful relationship between airborne pollutants and 

physiological metrics in a defined population.

 Propose a prototype design and development plan for an integrated multi-sensor 

and data management system that may be easily worn or carried by individuals 

within the defined target community/population. 
35

 Conceptualize data generation, management (may include processing & on-board 

storage), and transmission functionality of the device. 

 Propose a small-scale proof-of-concept study to validate the proposed prototype. 

 Study design process must include input from the target community/population. 

Phase 2 – Proof-of-Concept Pilot Project

 Finalists attended an event for feedback, questions, and business/entrepreneurial 

resources prepared by Challenge sponsors (EPA, HHS ONC, and NIEHS).

 Solvers developed prototypes and executed experimental validation of the system to 

bring together data from personal air quality and physiological monitors, showing 

how these types of data and sensors can be integrated for practical use by health 

and environmental agencies, and by individual citizens. Proof-of-concept data 

needed to illustrate the accuracy and precision of the raw data and of any processed 

data produced by the system. 

Why a Prize as Preferred Method: The challenge was an integral part of the joint effort 

by HHS and EPA to find next-generation solutions in the area of environmental and 

health sensor technologies and exploring the interaction of environment and health 

through granular, near-real-time data collection. Grants or contracts were not 

appropriate because the agencies sought a variety of different ideas rather than having 

to select one approach based only on a proposal. In addition, the challenge afforded

opportunities to communicate both agencies’ interest in this topic for the purpose of 

encouraging private-sector development.

Participants: The challenge had 32 final entrants. Most were small teams, and four

teams were from foreign countries despite clear messaging that only U.S. citizens or 

U.S.-based businesses were eligible to win the competition.

Timeline:

Phase 1 Open – 06/6/12 

Phase 1 Close – 10/5/12 

Phase 2 – 10/5/12 – 6/4/13 

Solicitation and Outreach Methods and Results: Social media, promotions at 

conferences, and outreach to developer community were used. HHS’s partner Health 

2.0 and the EPA contractor for this challenge, InnoCentive, coordinated these outreach 

efforts. In addition, EPA and NIEHS both engaged the public with press releases, blog 

posts, and announcements, including the launch announcement at the 2012 HDI event 

in Washington, DC. The challenge was also published on the Popular Science Innovation 

Pavilion run by InnoCentive. The combination of all these efforts led to significant 

interest in the challenge – the primary registration and submission site, run by 

InnoCentive, saw the creation of over 500 project rooms, a proxy for the number of 

people interested enough to register to enter the challenge. The largest source (40%) of 

page views of the InnoCentive page came from the Popular Science Pavilion. Usage of 
36

the Pavilion worked well for the challenge; the science- and academic-heavy community 

it reaches matched up well with the very technical requirements of the challenge. The 

restriction of America COMPETES to U.S. citizens and businesses, however, mitigated 

the usefulness of the Pavilion, as the Pavilion reaches an international audience rather 

than focusing on a domestic audience.

Incentives: Finalists will be invited to an event providing feedback, presentations from 

subject matter experts, and networking. $60,000 for the Phase 1 cash prize purse came

from EPA funds. $75,000 for the Phase 2 cash prize purse was drawn from ONC’s 

Investing in Innovation (i2) contract with Capital Consulting Corporation. The remaining 

$25,000 for the Phase 2 cash prize purse came from NIEHS.

Evaluation:

The following Phase 1 criteria used to review the submissions: 

 Strength of evidence regarding the linkage between air pollutant and physiological 

effect

 Viability of proposed sensor technologies to detect and quantify pollutants and their 

effects and to provide physiologically relevant health and air quality data 

 Viability of the proposed project plan for producing a prototype 

 Viability of the proposed instrument design as a wearable/portable device 

 Potential significance of technology and eventual benefit to target population(s)

 Viability of the proposed proof-of-concept study (low complexity is preferred)

 Appropriate use of community input in designing proof-of-concept study

The following Phase 2 criteria used to review the finalist submissions:

 Sensors: Successful technical collection of both health and environmental data 

 Data reporting: Successful formatting and transmission of data 

 Data processing and evaluation 

 Community involvement and interaction

Partnerships: ONC partnered with EPA and NIEHS to manage the challenge; EPA 

contracted with InnoCentive to provide challenge management services.

Resources: In addition to the cash prize purse, $550 in ONC travel funds will be used for 

transport to the finalist event held in Research Triangle Park, NC. One employee 

managed the challenge as a part of his overall challenge portfolio. NIEHS and EPA staff 

also participated in challenge management.

Results: Phase 1 was still open as of the close of FY 2012. Full competition results will be 

reported in the FY 2013 report to Congress. While the challenge is not yet complete, 

what has transpired so far has been successful – it has stimulated interest in the topic 

from a wide range of individuals and institutions including large companies, universities, 

athletics suppliers, and lone innovators. It demonstrates that the challenge mechanism 
37

is a viable platform for agency collaboration around a topic of mutual interest. The 

creation of the actual prototypes based on the finalists’ proposals will be a key 

component in evaluating the success of the challenge and what lessons can be learned 

in future ones that involve physical work (as opposed to software and coding).

4. Department of Health and Human Services

4.1. SMART-Indivo Challenge

Overview: This challenge called on developers to build an Indivo application that 

provides value to patients using data delivered through the SMART API and its Indivospecific extensions. Indivo is a free, open source, personally-controlled health record 

platform.40 SMART (Substitutable Medical Apps, Reusable Technologies)41 is one of four 

Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) funded by ONC. SMART 

facilitates innovation in health care by providing common APIs and standards for 

electronic medical records and personally controlled health records, enabling them to 

act as iPhone-like platforms; users can download or delete substitutable apps. Using the 

SMART API and standards, augmented by functionality like sharing, developers can 

create powerful patient-facing applications.

Website:

http://www.health2con.com/devchallenge/smart-indivo-app-challenge/

Problem Statement: The healthcare system is adapting to the effects of an aging 

population, growing expenditures, and a diminishing primary care workforce and needs 

the support of a flexible information infrastructure that facilitates innovation in 

wellness, health care, and public health. The challenge asked developers to create an

Indivo app that could access patient demographics, medications, laboratory tests, and 

diagnoses using Web standards. Developers could, for example, build a medication 

manager, a health risk detector, a patient-friendly laboratory visualization tool, or an 

app that integrates external data sources (such as those found at

http://www.healthdata.gov/) with patient records in real time. 

Goal: This program was designed to test the challenge mechanism as a way to support 

an existing grant program.

Why a Prize as Preferred Method: The challenge mechanism was viewed as a way to 

generate proof-of-concept apps for the developer framework produced by an ONC 

grant. This would be a novel way to generate interest and awareness of the project and 

 

40 http://indivohealth.org/

41 http://www.smartplatforms.org/
38

provide feedback on how developers unaffiliated with SMART viewed the framework. 

While the relatively small prize award may have put a ceiling on the amount of interest 

that would be generated, it also minimized the financial risk of an unsuccessful 

challenge.

Participants: The challenge had five entrants: one a single individual, others were small 

teams linked through their workplaces or small companies. 

Timeline:

Open - 7/9/2012 

Solicitation Close - 9/28/2012 

Winners Announced - 11/30/2012 

Solicitation and Outreach Methods and Results: Communications and outreach methods 

used include: social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn); outreach to the Health 2.0 

Developer Community; a webinar discussing the challenge, framing issues, and Q&A; 

and conference promotion by Health 2.0. In addition, the SMART team at Harvard 

Medical School assisted by adding a challenge page to the project website.

Incentives:

 First Place: $10,000 & publicity from Health 2.0/ONC

 Second Place: $2,000

 Third Place: $1,000

Evaluation: A four-member review panel of individuals from the SMART team reviewed 

and scored each of the submissions using a web form that listed the evaluation criteria 

and their weights. Each criterion for each submission was rated from one (lowest) to 

five (highest), and a composite score was calculated; space for qualitative feedback was 

also included. Live demos of the top scorers were held via webinar to give the challenge 

managers the opportunity to ask additional questions of the potential winners that 

provided insight into the submissions, the developers, and their feedback on the 

challenge. The criteria used to review the submissions were: 

 Usefulness to patients 

 Importance to clinical medicine or public health 

 Interface and presentation 

 Use of the Indivo and SMART APIs 

 Creative use of data from the sandbox and (optionally) from open health data 

sources

Partnerships: None
39

Resources: All funds were drawn from ONC’s Investing in Innovation (i2) contract with 

Capital Consulting Corporation. No agency funding outside of the contract was used. 

One employee managed the challenge as a part of his overall challenge portfolio.

Results: Final winners were not announced by the end of FY 2012, and final competition 

results will be included in the FY 2013 prizes report to Congress.

4.2. EHR Accessibility Module Challenge

Overview: ONC challenged multidisciplinary teams to create and test a module or 

application that makes it easy for disabled consumers to access and interact with the 

health data stored in their Electronic Health Records (EHRs). According to 2000 

estimates from the U.S. Bureau of Census, people with disabilities constitute 18.7 % of 

the non-institutionalized population. Among adults, individuals with disabilities are 

twelve times as likely to report having fair or poor health compared to those without a 

disability (47% vs. 4%). This population faces considerable difficulties with accessing and 

receiving care and the lack of coordinated care for this population is particularly costly.

Health expenditures for people with disabilities are estimated at $400 billion, more than 

a quarter of all heath expenditures. Health information technology (HIT) and EHRs hold 

great promise in improving the health outcomes and coordination of care for people 

with disabilities. However, the accessibility and usability of HIT is a matter of concern to 

people of diverse disabilities, including those who have vision, hearing, intellectual, 

manual dexterity, mental health, developmental, and other types of disabilities. The 

disabled population cannot afford to miss out on the benefits that can be derived from 

having access to the health information stored in EHRs just because existing tools are 

not compliant with their needs. Building an accessible system from the ground up can 

be more cost effective than retrofitting current ones to suit this large group and can 

prevent future interoperability issues. In addition, innovation in this area can also help 

older individuals with changing abilities due to aging, and can help inspire usability 

improvements for all consumers on a more general basis.

Website: 

http://www.health2con.com/devchallenge/ehr-accessibility-module/

Problem Statement: The challenge was for multidisciplinary teams to create and test a 

module or application that makes it easy for disabled consumers to access and interact 

with the health data stored in their EHRs. The application was to:

 Be easy for individuals with disabilities to interact with their health data

 Be simple to install and learn to use

 Identify and link to relevant local or online communities and organizations

 Be able to download data from one or more EHR systems – it did not need to be fully 

integrated across all systems

Goal: Improve service delivery
40

Why a Prize as Preferred Method: The prize mechanism was chosen because the 

advantages that come from open innovation were deemed more appropriate for the 

project than sole-source acquisition. These advantages include focusing the developer 

community on a high priority topic, leveraging developers’ creativity and knowledge of 

what makes successful apps rather than choosing a team or approach at the outset of 

the project and then having to stick with it, and using the public nature of the challenge 

mechanism to draw attention to the topic through live and social media 

announcements. Since one of the goals of the project was simply to create more 

potential solutions for stakeholders, a contract or grant that would have resulted in only 

one solution being created would not have been appropriate.

Participants: The challenge had five entrants, all of which were small teams linked 

through their workplaces or were small companies.

Timeline:

Submission Open -- 1/30/2012 

Submission Close -- 7/23/2012 

Winners Announced -- 8/13/2012 

Solicitation and Outreach Methods and Results: Communications and outreach methods 

used include social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn); outreach to the Health 2.0 

Developer Community; a webinar discussing the challenge, framing issues, and Q&A; 

and conference promotion by Health 2.0. The challenge was run in collaboration with 

HHS’ Office on Disability, which also promoted the challenge in its own communications. 

Subject matter experts from NIST and Access Board also assisted with outreach.

Incentives: Exhibition opportunity at relevant conference or event and $70,000 total 

cash prizes; all funds were drawn from ONC’s Investing in Innovation (i2) contract with 

Capital Consulting Corporation.

Evaluation: A four-member review panel composed of individuals representing NIST, 

Access Board, HHS’ Office on Disability, and CMS reviewed and scored each of the 

submissions against the weighted evaluation criteria. Live demos of the top scorers 

were held via webinar to give the challenge managers the opportunity to ask additional 

questions of the potential winners that provided insight into the submissions, the 

developers, and their feedback on the challenge.

The criteria used to review the submissions were: 

 Design and usability for the disabled user 

 Creative and innovative use of technologies

 Compliance with disability and accessibility standards including 508 and W3C

 Integration of module with HIT and EHR systems

 Potential for impact and ability to drive adoption and engagement
41

Partnerships: Formal partnerships were not established for this challenge, but the 

organizations of the subject matter experts (NIST, Access Board, and HHS Office on 

Disability) assisted in communications and outreach.

Resources: No agency funding outside of the contract was used. One employee 

managed the challenge as a part of his overall challenge portfolio.

Results: This challenge sought to advance the agency mission by improving access to 

personal health data for people with disabilities. While the winner met expectations, the 

submissions for this challenge were fewer than other similar i2 challenges and of lower 

quality – several submissions simply used the built-in accessibility features of operating 

systems and made only small tweaks to their already-existing products. This may have 

been due to low interest in the developer community or the fact that the i2 program 

was running multiple challenges concurrently, giving developers several to choose to 

participate in, thereby capping the number of developers that would submit for each.

4.3. Discharge Follow-Up Appointment Challenge

Overview: In order to support broader adoption and uptake of promising IT-enabled 

interventions that address care transitions, ONC challenged software developers to 

create an easy-to-use web-based tool to make post-discharge follow-up appointment 

scheduling an effective process for care providers, patients, and caregivers. Nearly one 

in five patients from a hospital will be readmitted within 30 days. A large proportion of 

readmissions can be prevented by improving communications and coordinating care 

before and after discharge from the hospital. Research has shown that scheduling 

follow-up appointments and post-discharge testing before a patient is discharged is one 

of the critical elements of a safe and effective transition. Most patients across the 

country continue to leave the hospital without confirmed appointments and many 

providers remain frustrated by a highly manual and unreliable system. Communities 

struggling with the process of scheduling and securing these appointments have 

articulated challenges faced by the following stakeholders:

 Patients and caregivers: Lack of involvement in transition process leading to lack of 

understanding of appointment necessity, scheduling conflicts, transportation 

difficulties, and high risk of cancelation or no-shows.

 Discharging hospital provider: Inability to see appointment availability to assist 

patient and caregiver with scheduling (resulting in the need for multiple phone 

calls), resistance from downstream providers while trying to secure appointment for 

harder to place/high risk patients, lack of feedback if a no-show or cancellation 

occurs, and burden of multiple post-discharge needs.

 Downstream provider: High no-show rates or cancelations, lack of predictability of 

appointment requests from discharging hospital provider, and lack of information 

regarding high-risk or harder to place patients.
42

A growing number of innovative consumer-facing tools are becoming available for 

patients and care givers to schedule appointments and rate providers. However, these 

tools have not yet reached high levels of adoption within communities, and to date have 

not targeted the appointment scheduling needs of patients, caregivers, and providers at 

the point of discharge from a hospital.

Website:

http://www.health2con.com/devchallenge/discharge-follow-up-appointmentchallenge/

Problem Statement: In order to support broader adoption and uptake of promising ITenabled interventions that address care transitions, ONC challenged software 

developers to create an easy-to-use web-based tool to make post-discharge follow-up 

appointment scheduling a more effective and shared process for care providers, 

patients and caregivers. In addition, developers needed to articulate a plan for broader 

adoption at the community level. The ideal application would include the following 

components:

 Easy to navigate user interface

 Easy to navigate process for downstream accepting providers

 Information for patient and caregiver convenience and preference 

 Critical background information for downstream provider

 Messaging capabilities to minimize no-shows and cancellations

 EHR interface capabilities where applicable

To anticipate the needs of a test bed organization or community, successful applicants 

also needed to submit a brief pilot implementation proposal (250-500 words) that 

addresses factors including timeline, description of pilot environment needs, and 

additional resource needs.

Goal: Improve service delivery

Why a Prize as Preferred Method: The prize mechanism was chosen because the 

advantages that come from open innovation were deemed more appropriate for the 

project than sole-source acquisition, as described above. In this case, one of the goals of 

the challenge was simply to create a greater number of potential solutions from which 

stakeholders could choose; a contract or grant would have resulted in only one.

Participants: The challenge had 13 entrants. Entrants were for the most part small 

teams (three to five people) linked through school or workplace, or small companies.

Timeline: 

Solicitation Open – 1/26/2012

Solicitation Close – 4/30/2012 

Winners Announced – 5/23/2012 
43

Solicitation and Outreach Methods and Results: Communications and outreach methods 

used include social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn); outreach to the Health 2.0 

Developer Community; a webinar discussing the challenge, framing issues, and Q&A; 

and conference promotion by Health 2.0. The challenge was also communicated directly 

to care transitions stakeholders at transitions-specific meetings. Considering the 

challenge’s technical complexity and the prizes offered, the number of submissions 

received was within the range of expectations. Challenge organizers suspect that one 

reason provider-oriented challenges tend to receive fewer submissions than consumertargeted ones is that the former are less likely to garner the mainstream attention.

Incentives: Partnership consideration with a pilot test bed community candidate; threeday site visit to the pilot community; and $5,000 total cash prizes. All funds were drawn 

from ONC’s Investing in Innovation (i2) contract with Capital Consulting Corporation.

Evaluation: A six-member review panel composed of individuals representing care 

transitions organizations and ONC reviewed and scored each of the submissions using a 

web form that listed the evaluation criteria and their weights. Live demos of the top 

scorers were held via webinar to give the challenge managers the opportunity to ask 

additional questions of the potential winners that provided insight into the submissions, 

the developers, and their feedback on the challenge.

The criteria used to review the submissions were: 

 Effectively integrate inpatient data and provide structured support for self-care 

 Integrate design and usability concepts to drive patient and provider adoption and 

engagement 

 Demonstrate creative and innovative uses of mobile technologies 

 Demonstrate potential to improve health status for individuals and the community 

 Leverage NwHIN standards including transport, content, and vocabularies 

 Demonstrate ability to implement the intervention in a pilot setting, and ultimately 

to scale in a community.

Partnerships: ONC was assisted by the Partnership for Patients (a CMS-led initiative) in 

communications activities.

Resources: No agency funding outside of the contract was used. One employee 

managed the challenge as a part of his overall challenge portfolio.

Results: This challenge advanced the agency’s mission by creating numerous new tools42

for providers to use to reduce patient readmissions through effective appointment 

scheduling. Reduction in readmissions due to usage of these tools will result in 

improved patient health and lowering of health care costs. The top submissions all 

 

42 http://www.health2con.com/devchallenge/discharge-follow-up-appointment-challenge/
44

included easy-to-use, synchronized scheduling tools for providers, consumers, and 

caretakers while also providing assorted other functionalities that appeal to different 

types of stakeholders, including integration with multi-purpose patient portals, 

appointment transportation coordination, and automated reminders. The First Place 

winning application, MyHealthDIRECT, is a web-based solution that effectively matches 

the demand for health care appointments with a supply of actual appointment slots.

4.4. Reporting Patient Safety Events

Overview: Hospitals and other health care organizations have multiple adverse event 

reporting relationships with Patient Safety Organizations (PSO), state agencies, and the

FDA. Hospitals struggle to increase internal incident reporting, especially by busy care 

providers, and to create effective systems for the quality and risk management staff to 

complete root cause analyses and follow-up which are required by both CMS and the 

Joint Commission. Quality and risk management staff suffer from reporting fatigue in a 

paper-based reporting system, which affects reporting frequency and quality – much 

effort is spent on convincing physicians and nurses to report incidents, complete

investigations, fill out the appropriate forms, and fax them to the appropriate agencies.

These reporting issues could be partially alleviated through the deployment of an 

effective software reporting solution. Solutions would need to make it easier for any 

qualified individual to file a report electronically and must allow the hospital quality and 

risk management staff to add information from follow-up investigation, submit reports 

as appropriate to PSOs, the state, or the FDA, and track follow-up activities.

Website: 

http://www.health2con.com/devchallenge/reporting-patient-safety-events-challenge/

Problem Statement: The challenge asked multi-disciplinary teams to develop an

application that facilitates the reporting of patient safety events, whether implemented 

in hospital or ambulatory settings. 

To qualify to win, applications needed to:

 Increase the ease of reporting patient safety events to the provider or parent 

organization.

 Enable providers to import relevant EHR, personal health record, and other 

electronic information, including screen shots, to the patient safety report and, in 

turn, submit an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Common 

Formats-compliant report to one or more PSOs.

 Capture useful demographic and other relevant information from each patient 

including age, gender, race, and relevant diagnoses.

 Capture information about the type of organization submitting the report using 

AHRQ’s PSO Information format.
45

 Reduce burden of reporting by enabling the provider or parent organization to have 

the option of submitting information in the patient safety report to non-PSO public 

health or health oversight organizations, including state or federal programs or 

accrediting or certifying bodies.

 Be platform-agnostic; and 

 Leverage and extend NwHIN standards and services including, but not limited to, 

transport (Direct, web services), content (Transitions of Care, CCD/CCR), and 

standardized vocabularies.

Goal: Improve service delivery

Why a Prize as Preferred Method: The prize mechanism was chosen because the 

advantages that come from open innovation were deemed more appropriate for the 

project than sole-source acquisition, as described above. Like i2 challenges, it was 

important to seed the space with a number of different solutions and give providers a 

handful of options, with varying functionalities, from which to choose.

Participants: The challenge had 13 entrants. Entrants were for the most part small 

teams (three to five people) linked through school or workplace, or small companies.

Timeline: 

Solicitation Open – 4/12/2012 

Solicitation Close – 8/31/2012 

Winners Announced – 11/14/2012 

Solicitation and Outreach Methods and Results: Communications and outreach methods 

used include social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn); outreach to the Health 2.0 

Developer Community; a webinar discussing the challenge, framing issues, and Q&A; 

and conference promotion by Health 2.0. The challenge was also communicated directly 

to patient safety stakeholders at safety-specific meetings. Considering the challenge’s 

technical complexity and the incentives offered, the number of submissions received 

was within the range of expectations.

Incentives: Exhibition opportunity at relevant conference or event and $70,000 total 

cash prizes; all funds were drawn from ONC’s Investing in Innovation (i2) contract with 

Capital Consulting Corporation.

Evaluation: A five-member review panel representing AHRQ, ONC, and FDA reviewed 

and scored each of the submissions against weighted evaluation criteria. Live demos of 

the top scorers were held via webinar to give the challenge managers the opportunity to 

ask additional questions of the potential winners that provided insight into the 

submissions, the developers, and their feedback on the challenge. Including members of 

the review panel on the live demos helped facilitate post-challenge activities and 

outreach about the challenge and winners.
46

Partnerships: Following the conclusion of the challenge, AHRQ provided assistance in 

communicating the winners and their solutions to appropriate stakeholders and 

potential customers.

Resources: No agency funding outside of the contract was used. One employee 

managed the challenge as a part of his overall challenge portfolio.

Results: The challenge helped the agency mission by creating new tools that advance 

the ability of providers, particularly busy hospitals, to report safety events. Like several 

other provider-oriented i2 challenges, these tools provide solutions where either there 

weren’t any before or the products available were not sufficient to enact meaningful 

change. Adoption of these tools will also help spread the use of AHRQ’s Common 

Formats, promoting a standard that will make exchange of safety reports a smoother 

and easier process in the future.

4.5. popHealth Tool Development Challenge

Overview: Under the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health 

(HITECH) Act, eligible health care professionals and hospitals can qualify for Medicare 

and Medicaid incentive payments when they adopt certified EHR technology and use it 

to achieve specified objectives. These "Meaningful Use" objectives include measureable 

benchmarks providers must meet to qualify for the incentive payments. popHealth is an 

open source software service developed under the guidance of the Office of the 

National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) that automates the 

reporting of the Stage 1 Meaningful Use clinical quality measures. popHealth integrates 

with a healthcare provider’s electronic health record (EHR) system using continuity of 

care records. It streamlines the automated generation of summary quality measure 

reports on the provider’s patient population. ONC challenged software developers to 

create applications that leveraged the popHealth open source framework, existing 

functionality, standards, and sample datasets to improve patient care and provide 

greater insight into patient populations.

Website:

http://www.health2challenge.org/pophealth-tool-development-challenge/

Problem Statement: ONC challenged software developers to create applications that 

leveraged the popHealth open source framework, existing functionality, standards, and 

sample datasets to improve patient care and provide insight into patient populations. 

Applications were to accomplish at least one of the following:

 Help providers improve patient safety

 Help providers use quality measure calculations to better engage with patients

 Help providers address disparities in the care they provide to their patient 

populations 
47

 Help providers engage patients and families

 Aggregate data from across multiple sites to allow public health entities to develop a 

more clearly defined picture of community health status and risk factors 

 Visualize information in the popHealth system related to meaningful use measures

 Target patients with high disease burden in need of early intervention 

Goal: Improve service delivery.

Why a Prize as Preferred Method: The prize mechanism was chosen because the 

advantages that come from open innovation were deemed more appropriate for the 

project than sole-source acquisition, as described above. This aspect was particularly 

relevant here since one of the goals of the challenge was to increase awareness of the 

popHealth tool in general and increase its adoption and usage by providers.

Participants: The challenge had 11 entrants. Entrants were for the most part small 

teams (three to five people) linked through school or workplace, or small companies.

Timeline:

Solicitation Open – 10/3/2011 

Solicitation Close – 1/21/2012 

Winners Announced – 2/20/2012 

Solicitation and Outreach Methods and Results: Communications and outreach methods 

used include social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn); outreach to the Health 2.0 

Developer Community; a webinar discussing the challenge, framing issues, and Q&A; 

and conference promotion by Health 2.0. The MITRE Corp. also helped spread the word 

to developer networks. 

Incentives: Exhibition opportunity at relevant conference or event and $100,000 total 

cash prizes; all funds were drawn from ONC’s Investing in Innovation (i2) contract with 

Capital Consulting Corporation.

Evaluation: A five-member review panel including representatives from ONC reviewed 

and scored each of the submissions against weighted criteria. Live demos of the top 

scorers were held via webinar to give the challenge managers the opportunity to ask 

additional questions of the potential winners that provided insight into the submissions, 

the developers, and their feedback on the challenge.

The criteria used to review the submissions were: 

 Ability to integrate with popHealth system and build upon existing functionality 

 Impact on stakeholders 

 Usability and design from the standpoint of all stakeholders 

 Creativity and innovation
48

Partnerships: ONC’s contractor MITRE Corp. developed the original popHealth 

framework and tool, so it was engaged to help market the challenge and to answer 

questions from potential solvers. Unsurprisingly, it was very helpful to have the experts 

on popHealth available to handle specific technical questions.

Resources: No agency funding outside of the contract was used. One employee and one 

detailee managed the challenge as a part of their overall challenge portfolio.

Results: This challenge advanced the agency mission by helping to make it easier for 

providers to report Meaningful Use clinical quality measures. Solutions were of high 

quality, due in part to the clean graphics of and ease of developing for the popHealth 

framework. They provided new functionalities for the tool which otherwise would have 

been done by MITRE, at higher contractor costs. However, long-term success for this 

challenge is highly dependent on adoption of the basic popHealth tool.

4.6. One in a Million Hearts Challenge

Overview: Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in America. The goal of 

the Million Hearts initiative is to prevent one million heart attacks and strokes over five 

years by reducing the number of people who need treatment and improving the quality 

of treatment for those who do need it. To achieve this goal, a range of programs will be 

targeted toward improving care of the ABCS: "A" for aspirin therapy for people at high 

risk, "B" for blood pressure control, "C" for cholesterol management, and "S" for 

smoking cessation. This challenge is a multidisciplinary call to innovators and developers 

to create an application that activates and empowers patients to get healthy and 

improve their heart health using the ABCS.

Website:

http://www.health2challenge.org/one-in-a-million-hearts-challenge/

Problem Statement:

Submissions were required to:

 Provide information about the Million Hearts initiative

 Have patients enter relevant information about their health such as age, body mass 

index, blood pressure, cholesterol level, smoking status, pertinent medical history, 

aspirin, and cholesterol-lowering agent use

 Use the patient-reported data and ABCS framework to generate targeted 

recommendations to the patient such as providing education and resources to help 

reduce fat and salt intake, increase exercise, lose weight, stop smoking, or increase 

medication adherence (e.g., to improve control of high blood pressure); using GPS 

technology to recommend nearby walks or places to eat healthier; recommending to 
49

the high-risk patient to see a primary care doctor if not on aspirin or cholesterollowering medication; or linking to online heart-health communities

 Be able to send patient information to electronic health records via Direct43

Goal: Solve a health problem(s)

Why a Prize as Preferred Method: The prize mechanism was chosen because the 

advantages that come from open innovation, as described above, were deemed more 

appropriate for the project than sole-source acquisition. 

Participants: The challenge had 19 entrants. Entrants were for the most part small 

teams (three to five people) linked through school or workplace, or small companies. 

Timeline: 

Solicitation Opened: 10/3/2011 

Solicitation Closed: 1/1/2012

Winners Announced: 3/25/2012 

Solicitation and Outreach Methods and Results: Communications and outreach methods 

used include social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn); outreach to the Health 2.0 

Developer Community; a webinar discussing the challenge, framing issues, and Q&A; 

and conference promotion (American College of Cardiology Conference). 

Incentives: Exhibition opportunity at relevant conference or event and $75,000 total 

cash prizes. All funds were drawn from ONC’s Investing in Innovation (i2) contract with 

Capital Consulting Corporation. 

Evaluation: A seven-member review panel representing an assortment of heart healthrelated organizations, including American Heart Association, American College of 

Cardiology, and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, reviewed and scored each 

of the submissions against weighted evaluation criteria. Since the submission package 

was a demo video and descriptive slides rather than an actual, publically available app, 

after the top finishers were determined live demos were held via webinar to prove that 

the solutions were not vaporware. In addition to the confirmation aspect, the demos 

allowed the challenge managers to ask questions of the potential winners that provided 

insight into the submissions, the developers, and their feedback on the challenge.

The criteria used to review the submissions were: 

 Patient engagement 

 Quality and accessibility of information and resources 

 Targeted and actionable information 

 

43 http://directproject.org
50

 Innovativeness and Usability 

 Bonus points awarded for creating both English and Spanish versions

Partnerships: ONC partnered with the Million Hearts Initiative, an intra-HHS partnership, 

for their subject-matter expertise and communications and outreach channels.

Resources: No agency funding outside of the contract was used. One employee and one 

detailee managed the challenge as a part of their overall challenge portfolio.

Results: This challenge advanced the agency mission by empowering individuals to 

improve their health using health IT tools. The submissions demonstrated a range of 

approaches to this type of tool, including websites, mobile-optimized sites, mobile 

phone apps, augmentations and additions to personal health portals, and SMS/text 

messages. 

4.7. What's in your Health Record Video Challenge

Overview: Video competition to inspire members of the public to develop short videos 

sharing a story about why having access to review what is in a patient’s health record 

can improve that patient’s quality of care or the care of a loved one. Patients have a 

legal right under HIPAA to request to see and get a copy of their health info from their 

health care providers. However, awareness about this right is low.

Website:

http://yourrecord.challenge.gov/

Problem Statement: This competition was one method of increasing awareness about 

patients’ legal right to get access to their medical records from their health care 

providers in an electronic format, if available. Participants were asked to provide a 

specific example (personal story, experience, testimonial, or thoughtful idea) of the 

benefits of having access to view their health record and the ability to review what's in 

their health record. The video had to encourage viewers to visit www.HealthIT.gov and 

to ask their health care provider to see and get a copy of their medical record.

Goal: Public education

Why a Prize as Preferred Method: Challenge organizers wanted to crowd-source 

compelling personal stories from the public that could potentially motivate and inspire 

others to adopt health IT and eHealth tools to be more engaged with their health care 

provider and to take a more active role in their own health and health care. Organizers 

also wanted to increase awareness about the role that health IT can play in people’s 

lives, and the challenge generated press and web traffic, which elevated awareness of

their Consumer eHealth program and started a viral conversation about the value of 
51

health IT. Prize money helped to attract a diversity of people to participate in these 

competitions — from a range of different ethnicities, ages and geographies.

Participants: 31 eligible submissions; 1/3 of entrants were teams, the rest were 

individuals.

Timeline:

Solicitation Open – 7/9/2012 

Solicitation Close – 8/23/2012 

Winner Announced – 9/10/2012 

Solicitation and Outreach Methods and Results: Newsletters and targeted emails to 

more than 300,000 registered users in the ChallengePost network. Targeted outreach 

via email and social media channels to influencers, hackathon organizers, and developer 

communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Google Groups, and Meetup. 

Weekly/bi-weekly targeted emails to the registrants and followers, providing reminders 

on important dates and tips on getting started. Leveraged all ONC communication 

channels, including ONC list-serv of 58K subscribers, blog, and social media channels.

Incentives: Prize purse was $7700 (5 awards: First Prize $3K, 2nd Prize $2K, 3rd Prize 

$1K, 2 honorable mention awards of $500); Money to oversee the competitions and 

allocate prize money was provided through a contract with RTI funded with FY12 funds. 

Evaluation: A four-person panel evaluated submissions. Each submission was evaluated 

on a scale of 1-5 on each of the following criteria: 1) quality of story and 2) potential 

impact on motivating others to access their health record. 

Partnerships: None

Resources: 20% of 1 FTE staffer to oversee the contract and assist with marketing and 

outreach support for each competition, including the recruitment of partners. Contract 

support provided by RTI, who sub-contracted to ChallengePost.

Results: Scripting, shooting, and editing two-minute promotional videos costs, on 

average, about $10,000. This competition received 31 eligible video submissions –

potentially $310,000 worth of promotional material and over 40 times the $7,700 in 

prize money awarded. In addition, the attention received, both mainstream and within 

the participating communities, was valuable. The challenge received hundreds of social 

media mentions as well as mainstream media exposure. The winning videos combined 

were viewed over 1,909 times. The challenge website received over 25K page views, 

over 7K site visits, and over 947 followers. Over 750 votes were cast by the public for 

submissions to determine the Popular Choice winner. 
52

4.8. Managing Meds Video Challenge

Overview: The Managing Meds Video Challenge invited the public to create short, 

inspiring videos sharing how they have used technology to manage taking medications 

effectively or to support individuals to take their medications as directed. There are 

serious consequences for patients from not taking medications as prescribed.

Website:

http://managingmeds.challenge.gov/

Problem Statement: Consumers or patients could participate by creating a less than two

minute video demonstrating how they can use technology for medication management. 

Goal: Public education

Why a Prize as Preferred Method: Challenge organizers wanted to crowd-source 

compelling personal stories from the public that could potentially motivate and inspire 

others to adopt health IT and eHealth tools to be more engaged with their health care 

provider and to take a more active role in their own health and health care. Challenge 

organizers also wanted to increase awareness about the role that health IT can play in 

people’s lives. The competitions generated press and a lot of web traffic, which elevated 

awareness of their Consumer eHealth, program and started a viral conversation about 

the value of health IT. The competition both about the videos that were generated and

about getting the public talking about the role patients could play in their health by 

leveraging technology. Prize money helped to attract a diversity of people to participate 

in these competitions — from a range of different ethnicities, ages, and geographies.

Participants: Members of the public and health care professionals were the targets of 

this competition. Registration was open for 10-weeks. Entrants: 21 eligible submissions. 

Only about 1/4 of entrants were teams, the rest were individuals.

Timeline:

Solicitation Opened – 8/10/2012 

Solicitation Closed – 10/19/2012 

Winners Announced – 11/13/2012 

Solicitation and Outreach Methods and Results: ONC leveraged its communication 

channels, including Buzz Blog; an email mailing list; and social media, such as targeted 

outreach to influencers, hackathon organizers, and developer communities on Twitter, 

Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Google Groups, and Meetup. The competition’s partner, 

Script Your Future, conducted outreach to member organizations and to pharmacy 

schools to support the competition. Newsletters and targeted emails were sent to more 

than 300,000 registered users in the ChallengePost network. Weekly/bi-weekly targeted 

emails were sent to the registrants and followers, providing reminders on important 
53

dates and tips on getting started. One lesson learned is to try to time submission period 

to correspond with dates in which potential participants will be the most engaged (ex. 

when pharmacy schools are in session).

Incentives: $7,500 total: $3K for first place, $2K for second place; $1K for third place; 

$500 for two Honorable Mentions; and $500 for a Popular Choice award.

Evaluation: A three-person panel evaluated submissions. Each submission was 

evaluated on a scale of 1-5 on each of the following criteria: 1) Quality of the idea; 2) 

Implementation of the idea, and 3) Potential impact on health IT adoption.

Partnerships: Script Your Future

Resources: 20% of 1 FTE federal person to oversee the contract and assist with 

marketing and outreach support for each competition, including the recruitment of 

partners. Contract support provided by RTI, who sub-contracted to ChallengePost.

Results: The window for submissions was still open at the end of FY 2012, so 

competition results will be reported in the FY 2013 prizes report to Congress. 

4.9. Healthy People 2020 Leading Health Indicators App Challenge

Overview: The HHS Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (ODPHP) and 

ONC challenged teams of developers and health professionals to co-design an 

application that will be used to help solve one or more of their Nation’s high-priority 

health problems as part of HHS’s Healthy People 2020 initiative.

44

Website:

http://www.health2con.com/devchallenge/healthy-people-2020-leading-healthindicators-app-challenge/

Problem Statement: The challenge aimed to address one or more of the 12 leading 

health indicator (LHI) topics by encouraging health professionals to work with 

developers in designing an application that could be used to address the indicators at 

the community level. To enter the competition, participants had to create an application 

that makes health indicators customizable and easy to use.

Goal: Solve a health problem(s)

 

44 http://www.healthypeople.gov
54

Why a Prize as Preferred Method: A prize competition was developed in order to 

encourage ideas about how leading health indicators can be addressed in innovative 

ways and to inspire quick responses from software application developers.

Participants: The challenge aimed to mobilize developers while also engaging health 

professionals and stakeholders through a collaborative, co-designing process. Subject 

matter experts with an idea for an app were encouraged to reach out to developers and 

designers to turn their ideas into a reality. There were 16 final submissions. Most entries 

represented a company, and the winning teams ranged from 2-6 team members. 

Timeline:

Solicitation Open – 10/31/2011

Solicitation Close – 03/09/2012

Winners Announced – 3/30/2012 

Solicitation and Outreach Methods and Results: ODPHP conducted outreach via Healthy 

People 2020 e-blasts, Twitter, and LinkedIn. ODPHP and ONC worked with Health 2.0 to 

reach out to the developer community via Health 2.0's outreach channels. Challenge 

organizers also reached out to academia and engaging students or young developers. 

HHS hosted a one-hour Webinar for interested participants to learn more about 

challenge requirements and criteria. 

Incentives: An opportunity to provide an app demo at the 2012 National Health 

Promotion Summit. $15,000 total cash prizes were allocated through a sub-contract.

Evaluation: The prize competition utilized the following judging criteria: easy access; 

platform neutrality; user appeal; innovation of design; broad applicability; integration of 

health data; evidence of co-design and collaboration, and accessibility.

Partnerships: ODPHP and ONC had a subcontract with Health 2.0 to administer the 

challenge.

Resources: ONC provided $15K to Health 2.0 to pay for administering and marketing the 

challenge to developers and stakeholders. ODPHP provided $15K honorariums that

allowed the winners to come to the National Health Promotion Summit in April 2012 to 

demo their app among stakeholders.

Results: The prize competition advanced the main purpose of the leading health 

indicators, which is to communicate the nation's high-priority health issues, and actions 

that can be taken to address them. The challenge provided visibility around this set of 

indicators, and encouraged Healthy People stakeholders to start problem-solving by 

thinking about creative solutions to addressing important health issues. The final three 
55

winners were Community Commons, PhenotypeIT, and Trilogy45. The First Place 

Community Commons application offers an interactive mapping, networking, and 

learning utility to leaders from community to national levels. The application seeks to 

help create informed, healthy, equitable, and sustainable communities. Key features 

include an interactive initiatives map and an array of starter maps tools that to track

place-based around the country.

4.10. Beat Down Blood Pressure Video Challenge

Overview: ONC hosted this video competition to encourage members of the public to 

share their personal stories about how they are using health IT to manage high blood 

pressure and to crowd-source stories about which tools that prevent or manage high 

blood pressure. 

Website:

http://bloodpressure.challenge.gov/

Problem Statement: Participants were asked to make a video describing how they use 

health IT or consumer e-health tools to prevent or manage high blood pressure.

Individuals and teams who comply with rules were eligible to participate. There were 

several categories and associated prize money. There were three categories for 

consumers to enter using health IT for: (1) monitoring; (2) taking meds; and (3) 

preventing high blood pressure. Plus, there were two categories with prizes for health 

care providers to enter: (1) provider monitoring; and (2) provider medication 

management.

Goal: Public education

Why a Prize as Preferred Method: Challenge organizers wanted to crowd-source 

compelling personal stories from the public that could potentially motivate and inspire 

others to adopt health IT and eHealth tools to be more engaged with their health care 

provider and to take a more active role in their own health and health care. Challenge 

organizers also wanted to increase awareness about health IT.

Participants: The competition was aimed at all Americans, although challenge organizers 

suspected there would be greater interest from individuals who have a personal 

connection to high blood pressure — either themselves or a family history of dealing 

with the disease. Challenge organizers received 14 eligible submissions — only one team 

entered, the rest were individuals. Prize money helped to attract a diversity of people to 

participate from a range of different ethnicities, ages, and geographies.

 

45 http://www.health2con.com/devchallenge/healthy-people-2020-leading-health-indicatorsapp-challenge/
56

Timeline: 

Solicitation Open – 3/28/2012 

Solicitation Close – 5/16/2012 

Winners Announced – 6/15/2012 

Solicitation and Outreach Methods and Results: Newsletters and targeted emails to 

more than 300,000 registered users in the ChallengePost network. Targeted outreach 

via email and social media channels to influencers, hackathon organizers, and developer 

communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Google Groups, and Meetup.

Weekly/bi-weekly targeted emails to the registrants and followers, providing reminders 

on important dates and tips on getting started. 

Incentives: $4,500 available. Money to oversee the competitions and allocate prize 

money was provided through a contract with RTI funded with FY12 funds. 

Evaluation: Submissions were evaluated by a four-person panel. Each submission was 

evaluated against criteria including quality of idea; implementation of idea, and 

potential impact on health IT adoption. 

Partnerships: American Heart Association and Million Hearts

Resources: 20% of 1 FTE federal person to oversee the contract and assist with 

marketing and outreach support for each competition, including the recruitment of 

partners. Contract support provided by RTI, who sub-contracted to ChallengePost.

Results: Scripting, shooting, and editing a two-minute promotional video costs, on 

average, about $10,000. The ONC Blood Pressure Video Challenge received 14 eligible 

video submissions – potentially $140,000 worth of promotional material and 31 times 

the $4,500 in prize money awarded. The attention received, both mainstream and 

within the participating communities, elevated awareness of the Consumer eHealth 

program and started a viral conversation about the value of health IT. The challenge 

received hundreds of social media mentions as well as mainstream media exposure.

There were nearly 19,000 page views, over 7,000 site visits, nearly 1,500 votes cast for 

submissions to determine the Popular Choice Award winner, 593 followers, 81 

"Accepted the Challenge" to receive submitter updates, 14 eligible video submissions,

and 5 winners. This impact helps advance ONC's goal of increasing consumer awareness 

about the value of health IT and driving greater adoption and use of eHealth. The 

winning videos combined were viewed over 1,735 times.

4.11. Healthy New Year Challenge

Overview: This challenge was a call for ordinary Americans to create short videos that 

captured their New Year’s resolution and how they plan to leverage technology to 
57

achieve their goal. The purpose of the video competition is to crowd-source personal 

stories from the public to motivate and inspire others to adopt and use health IT.

Website: 

http://healthynewyear.challenge.gov

Problem Statement: Develop a short video focused on a health-related New Year’s 

Resolution and describe how health IT will be used to help achieve that goal. In addition, 

the video had to point to HealthIT.gov for more information.

Goal: Public education

Why a Prize as Preferred Method: The prize added an incentive for ordinary Americans 

to share their personal story/testimonial about how they were leveraging health IT to 

improve their health and health care. Challenge organizers wanted to crowd source 

authentic stories from the public and engage the public in voting and sharing these 

videos to help generate greater awareness of the value of health IT and the role that 

eHealth can play in helping people take more control of their health.

Participants: Challenge organizers goal was to mobilize a diversity of participants from a 

variety of demographics and ethnicities. Anyone over the age of 18 years old was 

eligible to participate. They received 47 eligible submissions from a diversity of 

demographics and ethnicities.

Timeline:

Solicitation Open – 1/9/2012 

Solicitation Closed – 2/16/2012 

Winners Announced – 3/22/2012 

Solicitation and Outreach Methods and Results: Issued an official HHS Press release to 

announce this competition as the first in a series of health IT video competitions that 

would occur throughout 2012. Challenge organizers leveraged ONC communication 

channels, including the Health IT Buzz Blog, the ONC List Serve (around 58K subscribers), 

and social media outreach through Twitter to mobilize participation. In addition, 

ChallengePost also conducted its own outreach to followers of its other competitions.

There were over 100,000 page views throughout the competition period; more than 

25,000 site visits; greater than 10,000 votes cast for submissions to determine the 

Popular Choice Award winner; 1,042 followers of the competition; 111 "Accepted the 

Challenge" to receive submitter updates; 47 eligible video submissions; and 7 winners.

Incentives: $2000 - 1

st, $1000 - 2nd, $500-3rd, $250 - Honorable Mention (2), $750 -

Popular Choice; FY12 funds supported a contract to administer these challenges. 
58

Evaluation: Judges evaluated each submission based on the quality of the idea, the 

implementation of the idea, and the potential impact on health IT adoption.

Partnerships: None

Resources: 1 FTE dedicated about 20% of her time to oversee the video competition

series throughout 2012. A contract was awarded to RTI for administering the 

competitions, which included prize money. RTI sub-contracted to ChallengePost.

Results: This video competition helped increase awareness about how consumers can 

leverage health IT to accelerate and support greater engagement in their health and 

health care. This competition generated over 100K views and impressions to the site as 

well as a number of press related articles in the trade publications. The 2nd place 

winning video has been used on multiple occasions by senior level ONC staff in 

presentations and has received rave reviews. Scripting, shooting, and editing twominute promotional videos costs, on average, about $10,000. The ONC Health New Year 

Video Challenge received 47 eligible video submissions – potentially $470,000 worth of 

promotional material and 94 times the $5,000 in prize money awarded. The winning 

videos combined were viewed over 4,438 times.

4.12. Design by Biomedical Undergraduate Teams (DEBUT) Challenge

Overview: The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) and 

the National Institutes of Health (NIH) challenged teams of undergraduate students to 

design and build innovative solutions to unmet health and clinical problems. Entries 

were solicited in three challenge categories, diagnostics; therapeutics; and technology,

to aid underserved populations and individuals with disabilities. The winning team in 

each category received a $10,000 prize, and was honored at an award ceremony during 

the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Biomedical Engineering Society in Atlanta, GA. In each 

category, challenge organizers also identified two honorable mentions with no 

accompanying monetary prize. The goals of the challenge were to: (1) provide 

undergraduate students valuable experiences such as working in teams, identifying 

unmet clinical needs, and designing, building and debugging solutions for such openended problems; (2) generate novel tools to improve healthcare, consistent with NIBIB’s 

purpose to support research, training, dissemination of health information, and other 

programs with respect to biomedical imaging and engineering; and (3) highlight and 

acknowledge accomplishments of undergraduate students. DEBUT is the only 

competition focused on biomedical design and open only to undergraduate students.

Website: 

debut.challenge.gov

Problem Statement: The problem addressed by the challenge was the design of 

innovative solutions to unmet health and clinical problems in three categories: 
59

diagnostic devices and methods; therapeutic devices and methods; and technology to 

aid underserved populations and individuals with disabilities. Teams composed of at 

least 3 undergraduate students in Biomedical Engineering and related fields were 

eligible to compete with original designs developed solely by them. The entries were 

judged on the significance of the problem addressed, impact on potential users, 

innovativeness of design, and the evidence of a working prototype.

Goal: Improved service delivery; public education; and engagement of teams of 

undergraduate students in open-ended biomedical design projects.

Why a Prize as Preferred Method: The prize mechanism was used as a complement to 

other mechanisms already used by their agency, to directly engage and excite students.

Participants: The targeted participants were undergraduate students in Biomedical 

Engineering and related fields. Challenge organizers received entries from 61 student 

teams made up of a total of 284 students from 39 different universities. 

Timeline: 

Solicitation Open – 1/3/2012 

Solicitation Close – 6/2/2012 

Winners Announced – 7/31/2012 

Award Ceremony – 10/26/2012 

Solicitation and Outreach Methods and Results: Agency website, Challenge.gov, direct emails to Biomedical Engineering Departments, listserv, press release, and word of 

mouth.

Incentives: $10,000 cash prize purse, along with up to $2,000 reimbursement to travel 

to award ceremony for the winner in each of the three categories. Also, two honorable 

mentions in each of three challenge categories.

Evaluation: Nine judges from the NIH with relevant backgrounds evaluated the entries 

for significance of the problem addressed, impact on potential users, innovative nature

of design, and the evidence of a working prototype.

Partnerships: Challenge organizers have collaborated with the Biomedical Engineering 

Society to incorporate an award ceremony for their challenge within their annual 

meeting and the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA) to 

announce DEBUT to their stakeholders via their websites and listservs.

Resources: Agency resources directed to the challenge, other than the cash prizes 

described above, consist of personnel, including the Challenge Manager; the senior 

leadership of NIBIB who provide guidance; scientific staff who contribute to the 
60

evaluation of the entries; and technical staff who manage the website. Funding for 

execution of the challenge was allocated under NIBIB’s appropriation account.

Results: DEBUT generated a lot of excitement among Biomedical Engineering 

departments and students, as well as those in life sciences, and other areas of 

engineering and computer science. Challenge organizers received 61 entries from 39 

different universities with 284 students involved in the projects submitted. Most of the 

entries were of very high quality. In addition to engaging students in increasingly 

sophisticated design projects, the challenge served to introduce the next generation of 

biomedical engineers to the NIBIB.

4.13. Now Trending: #Health in My Community

Overview: Studies show that social media trends can be powerful indicators of 

community health issues. With early identification, health officials can respond quickly 

and educate the public on how to protect their health and minimize the spread of the 

disease, therein enhancing individual and community resilience and potentially 

preventing a public health emergency, such as a pandemic. The Office of the Assistant 

Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) challenged participants, from 

university students to large companies, to create a web-based application that analyzes 

open source Twitter data for health topics and delivers “Top 5 Trending Illnesses” 

outputs for both a specified geographic area and the national level. This challenge was 

created in response to a request from state and local health officials to have an easy-touse application that makes social media a useful information source for health.

Website: 

http://challenge.gov/HHS/334-now-trending-health-in-my-community

Problem Statement: Studies are showing that trending topics on social media can serve 

as an early indicator and warning of emerging health issues within a community. This 

challenge offered the opportunity for an individual or team to showcase their skills at 

the national level while helping to advance the field of health analytics. Specifically, this 

challenge asked participants to create a web-based application that analyzes open 

source Twitter data for health topics and delivers “Top 5 Trending Illnesses” outputs for 

both a specified geographic area and the national level.

Goal: Improve health surveillance and situational awareness.

Why a Prize as Preferred Method: Due to the focus of the challenge being a newer area 

of study, ASPR believed that a challenge would be a good way to be able to tap into 

innovative minds outside of traditional contracting routes in order to create a useful and 

forward thinking tool for health officials.
61

Participants: ASPR hoped to have a variety of entrants to this challenge, from academia 

to companies to private citizens. The competition had 33 total entries with teams and 

individuals that came from all different backgrounds. Thirteen entries were from 

companies (both large and small), ten were from academia, six were private individuals, 

and four were private teams. The entries were from all areas of the country.

Timeline:

Solicitation Open – 3/16/2012 

Solicitation Close – 6/1/2012 

Winners Announced – 9/13/2012 

Solicitation and Outreach Methods and Results: ASPR used a multifaceted marketing 

plan that included social media, email, presentations before key stakeholder and target 

participant groups, and outreach through HHS leadership. Social media and referral 

from friends/colleagues turned out to be the most successful outreach methods.

Incentives: App developer presentation at the ASPR FUSION Bring Your Own Data 

Citizen Science Conference; $21,000 in prize money; $1,000 toward travel to conference 

from ASPR OPEO operating budget.

Evaluation: ASPR used a panel of technical advisors to initially review the entries. These 

advisors represented all the areas that this competition touched: health, social media, 

and technology. The technical advisors reviewed the entries and provided their 

feedback to ASPR for consideration. Participant entries were judged on their 

application’s accessibility from multiple platforms and for users of all ability levels, the 

application’s innovation, user interface, and potential to impact health situational 

awareness. The challenge judge, Dr. Nicole Lurie, selected the ultimate winner.

Challenge organizers felt the use of technical advisors form specific industries was an 

effective way to approach a competition that has a reach into multiple disciplines.

Partnerships: None

Resources: The competition was created and administered by the Fusion Cell, an office 

within ASPR. This required the full time efforts of one employee (Challenge Manager) 

and part time efforts of two others in the office. To assist with challenge management, 

the services of MetroStar Systems, Inc. were procured via the GSA 541.4G schedule.

Results: Since the close of the competition, the winning technology has been used by 

health departments from the local to the Federal level. State and local departments 

have used the website and its information to inform the health situational awareness of 

their populations, as an indication of where public health messaging is needed, and to 

build a baseline of health information in social media for better identification of 

anomalies in data. At the Federal level, the website was used in both the Hurricane Isaac 

and Hurricane Sandy response in order to track health trends in affected populations.
62

4.14. 2012 Surgeon General’s Video Contest: Tobacco- I’m Not Buying It

Overview: The Surgeon General’s (SG) Video Contest for Youth and Young Adults invited 

young Americans to speak up about tobacco and tell us why they are “not buying it.” In 

conjunction with the 2012 Surgeon General’s Report, “Preventing Tobacco Use among 

Youth and Young Adults”, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) challenged youth aged 

13-17 and young adults ages 18-25 to develop original videos that featured one or more 

of the report findings.

Website: 

http://2012sgr.challenge.gov/ or 

http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/sgr/2012/contest/

Problem Statement: Tobacco use by youth, teens, and young adults remains shockingly 

high in the United States. The 2012 Surgeon General’s Report highlighted the health 

impacts of tobacco use and how the tobacco industry targets youth through advertising, 

promotional activities, and manipulation of peer group influences.

Goal: Public education

Why a Prize as Preferred Method: Using a prize competition provided the ability to 

promote the 2012 SG’s report in a way that engaged the target audiences where and 

how they communicate: online, via social networks, and through user-generated 

content like video. Youth and young adults are the leading creators and viewers of 

online video content, and the challenge allowed the CDC to disseminate key messages 

from the SG’s report through peer-to-peer communication. Over 80% of social media 

users trust their peers more than they do a company or brand so incentivizing youth 

people to learn about the findings in the report and communicate the key messages in 

their own voice and style was a must for this report focused solely on youth and young 

adults. The winning videos continue to be featured, viewed, and shared from the CDC’s 

website and social media profiles including YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.

Participants: Youth and young adults, ages 13-25. OSH received a total of 85 video 

submissions, of which 63 met the challenge criteria.

Timeline:

Solicitation Open – 3/8/2012 

Solicitation Close – 4/22/2012 

Winners Announced – 5/30/2012 

Solicitation and Outreach Methods and Results: OSH engaged youth advocacy partners 

and the general public through traditional and social media channels to encourage 

submissions and voting for the finalists in each category. 
63

Incentives: Winning videos were announced by U.S. Surgeon General and promoted on 

YouTube and CDC.gov. A total of $10,000 was divided among the 4 categories. A $1,000 

grand prize and three $500 runner-up prizes were awarded for the middle/high school 

competition (both English and Spanish categories) and the young adult/college 

competition (both English and Spanish categories). Upon selection of the winning videos 

by an expert panel, all 10 winning videos were featured on CDC’s website, promoted via 

earned and social media and live on CDC’s YouTube channel.

Evaluation: Submissions were initially screened for the required criteria, described 

below, by a panel of CDC staff. The eligible videos were then uploaded to YouTube, and 

the general public voted for their favorites in the four (two age-based categories for 

both English and Spanish submissions) categories based on the following challenge 

criteria: creativity; use of the one or more key SG Report findings; and use or inclusion 

of the official SGR website. The top 10 submissions in each category from the public 

voting were then judged by an expert panel made up of Federal and national tobacco 

prevention and control partners.

Partnerships: Key partnerships were leveraged to ensure the success of the Surgeon 

General’s Video challenge. Officially, challenge organizers worked closely with the 

Surgeon General’s office and tobacco prevention and control partners and grantees to 

engage youth advocacy groups in their states and communities. Non-traditional partners 

played a key role in the success of the challenge, as challenge organizers engaged 

educational institutions, youth ministries, and other youth groups across the country.

This outreach to non-traditional partners to promote the challenge resulted in an 

increased number of challenge entries.

Resources: Prize money was funded through an ICF contract. The total amount of prize 

money allocated was $10,000, of which $9,000 in prize money was awarded. A minimal 

amount of ICF contract hours were used to develop marketing materials.

Results: Through this competition, OSH was able to focus on youth tobacco prevention 

and promote the release of the 2012 Surgeon General’s report. Using video as a creative 

outlet, young people personally engaged with the report findings and educated their 

peers about the dangers of tobacco use. Winners were interviewed by local newspapers

and asked to perform their songs or show their videos at their local high schools, 

churches, and events. Tobacco prevention and control partners with winners from their 

states have requested copies of their videos to show in presentations and for their web 

and social media efforts. The U.S. Surgeon General has featured winning videos in her 

talks and presentations about the 2012 Surgeon General’s report, since she officially 

announced the winners during a live Twitter chat in May of 2012. All videos can be 

viewed from the CDC Office on Smoking and Health competition web page.

46

 

46 http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/sgr/2012/contest/#vote
64

4.15. Surgeon General’s Healthy Apps Challenge

Overview: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Healthy Apps Challenge encouraged the 

development and submission of technology applications that will complement and 

enhance two key aspects of the Surgeon General’s prevention agenda: The Surgeon 

General’s Vision for a Healthy and Fit Nation47 and the nation’s first National Prevention 

Strategy.

48 Specifically, the challenge highlighted the ability of new technologies to: (1) 

provide health information tailored to the needs of the user; and (2) empower users 

(the general public) to regularly engage in and enjoy health-promoting behaviors related 

to fitness and physical activity, nutrition and healthy eating, and physical, mental and 

emotional well-being. This challenge was conducted in collaboration with ONC.

Website: http://sghealthyapps.challenge.gov/

Problem Statement: Non-communicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, 

and chronic respiratory disease account for a large majority of deaths in the United 

States. The links between unhealthy behaviors (e.g., physical inactivity, unhealthy 

eating, tobacco use, excessive alcohol use) and these chronic illnesses have been well 

established. The Surgeon General’s Vision for a Healthy and Fit Nation and the National 

Prevention Strategy both highlight the importance of health behaviors in preventing 

disease and creating a healthy and fit nation. The National Prevention Strategy further 

envisions a prevention-oriented society where all sectors recognize the value of health 

for individuals, families, and society and work together to achieve better health for all 

Americans. The National Prevention Strategy also emphasizes the importance of 

empowering individuals with tools and information to make healthy choices and shifting 

the focus of the nation’s health to prevention and integrated wellness (i.e., physical, 

behavioral, social, and emotional health), rather than focusing primarily on illness and 

disease. National public health recommendations and guidelines currently exist for 

physical activity;49 nutrition,

50 and overall health and wellness.51 Yet, currently, 

approximately 40 percent of American adults report that they do not engage in any 

leisure-time physical activity, with less than half the population meeting public health 

recommendations for physical activity. In 2009, fewer than 1 in 10 Americans included

the recommended amounts of fruit and vegetables in their diet. Over one-third of 

Americans are currently obese. Research also finds that sleep health contributes to 

obesity and disease, but 40 percent of Americans report unintentionally falling asleep 

during the day at least once in the preceding month.

 

47 http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/initiatives/walking/index.html

48 http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/initiatives/prevention/strategy/national-preventionstrategy-fact-sheet.pdf

49 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans: http://www.health.gov/paguidelines/

50 MyPlate: http://www.choosemyplate.gov/

51 Healthy People 2020: http://www.healthypeople.gov/2020/default.aspx
65

Goal: Encourage the development (by innovators) and use (by everyday Americans) of 

consumer-facing technology to create a healthy and fit nation.

Why a Prize as Preferred Method: A competition offers an excellent way to reach the 

people and businesses that are involved in application development and to encourage 

them to submit their apps for evaluation. The built-in publicity and organization 

provided through the Challenge.gov site means that the resources of a small office could 

be maximized. Challenge organizers’ office has no available resources to offer prize 

money, so the attraction for those who entered was the publicity involved.

Participants: Developers, designers, and entrepreneurs. 56 teams submitted apps 

ranging from those help individuals to track their health promoting behaviors to locators 

that identify services that can improve health or reinforce healthful outcomes.

Timeline: 

Solicitation Open – 12/6/2011 

Solicitation Closed – 12/31/2011 

Winners Announced – 2/22/2012 

Solicitation and Outreach Methods and Results: Social media (Twitter) and outreach to 

new media community through promotion at conferences and in keynote speeches.

Incentives: No cash prize purses were offered for this competition. Winners and those 

highly recommended are highlighted in media release (February 17, 2012) and on the 

Surgeon General’s website.

52

Evaluation: In the first round, ONC contractors assessed the eligibility of submissions on 

the basis of essential requirements: acceptable platform; functionality; available free; 

no requirements for additional purchases or equipment. In the second round of 

evaluations, each app was evaluated by at least two people from within HHS with 

relevant technical and policy expertise. The top 15 submissions were then sent to highprofile internal and external assessors for evaluation; again, each application received 

two separate evaluations. The stringent HHS requirements imposed on external judges 

really precluded their use in the formal sense.

Partnerships: None

 

52 http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/news/pressreleases/sg_healthy_app_challengewinners.html
66

Resources: The only costs incurred by the Office of the Surgeon General under this 

Challenge were those for the Federal Register Notice and the time of a senior policy 

staff person. Additional resources and time were provided by ONC through i2.

Results: 72 eligible entries were received, and mostly of high standard. The Surgeon 

General’s ability to embrace new technologies, use them to encourage people to be 

more engaged in healthy activities, and show how they can help people make healthy 

choices all help drive awareness of key OSG and HHS initiatives such as prevention, 

obesity, tobacco, healthy eating, and physical activity. The winning app in one category 

needed to addresses both exercise and healthy eating. The winning Lose It! app helps 

users achieve diet and exercise goals by setting a daily calorie budget and recording 

food intake and exercise to meet that budget. Users can invite friends to view logs on 

Facebook to boost motivation and encourage one another. Two other apps in this 

category received high marks. Fit Friendzy is an app that encourages everyone to be 

more active by highlighting the benefits of not just traditional exercise, but also of tasks 

like gardening, dancing, housecleaning, and snow shoveling, allowing users to challenge 

themselves or join in challenges with friends. There is also the option to share exercise 

data with health care providers. The MapMyFitness app encompasses both fitness and 

nutrition education, using built-in GPS of mobile devices to track fitness activities. Users 

can establish a training log, record activity, keep track of calories consumed, and share 

information with friends. The winner in a second category needed to encourage people 

to develop healthy habits, make positive changes in their lives, and stick with them. The 

winning Healthy Habits app recognizes that good health is not just about keeping active 

and eating healthily, but also about getting a good night’s sleep, thinking positively, and 

spending time with family and friends. It also addresses health issues such as smoking, 

wearing sunscreen, taking time for creative activities, and reducing stress. Users can 

choose which healthy habits to track. Two additional apps focused on children’s health 

received high marks. Max’s Plate is an app that educates young children and their 

parents about healthy eating and provides a fun and entertaining way to learn about 

good nutrition. Short Sequence: Kids’ Yoga Journey is an app that has simple instructions 

for yoga poses for children and beautiful illustrations.

4.16. Seeing My World through a Safer Lens Video Challenge

Overview: In commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of the CDC National Center for 

Injury Prevention and Control (Injury Center), challenge organizers hosted a video 

competition to answer the question, "What does Injury and Violence Prevention Look 

Like in My Community?" The "Seeing My World through a Safer Lens" video competition

asked injury and violence professionals, students, and the general public to create a 

short video that shows injury and violence prevention in their neighborhood, 

community, state, or region. This competition provided a community/local perspective 

on prevention of the leading cause of death among Americans under the age of 44. By 

drawing attention to how others are working in their communities to prevent violence 

and injuries, challenge organizers can change the perspective that injuries are not just 
67

random “accidents,” but rather a preventable public health issue. The "Seeing My World 

through a Safer Lens" video competition asks injury and violence professionals, 

students, and the general public to create a short video that shows injury and violence 

prevention in their neighborhood, community, state, or region.

Website: 

saferlens.challenge.gov

Problem Statement: Through personalized videos, challenge entrants showed how 

proven prevention strategies are being implemented in various forms of communities.

By showcasing the winning videos in each category of submission (Student View, 

General Public View, and Injury and Violence Professional View), the challenge was 

highlighted steps for injury and violence prevention. The participants were asked to 

create a 90 second video that answered the question, “What does injury and violence 

prevention look like in my community?” Entrants were required to choose from a 

selected list of injury and violence topics to showcase one prevention strategy or the 

impact of injuries or violence where they live. 

Goal: Public education

Why a Prize as Preferred Method: In order to reach the general public population and 

engage students, a small cash prize ($500/ category) was offered to incentivize 

populations that are not already engaged in public health conversations around violence 

and injury prevention. In order to gain a broader perspective from local injury and 

violence professionals that do not have the means or programs to compete for 

structured contracts, they were also eligible for a cash prize.

Participants: The “Seeing My World through a Safer Lens” video competition reached 

out to partner organizations, violence and injury prevention professionals, student 

organizations, and the general public for submissions into the competition. In total there 

were 54 submitted videos, 25 of which adhered to all of the rules and video eligibility 

criteria by the final submission date. The final 25 videos were judged in three categories 

violence and injury prevention professionals (10 videos), students (9 videos), and 

general public (6 videos). 

Timeline: 

Solicitation Open – 5/1/2012 

Solicitation Close – 7/31/2012 

Winners Announced – 9/10/2012 

Solicitation and Outreach Methods and Results: The promotion of the “Seeing My World 

though a Safer Lens” video competition included: social media outreach; listserv and 

GovD email announcements to key partners and constituents; online promotion; and 

direct outreach to partner organization for inclusion in their websites and 
68

announcements. Other organizations and student affiliates were solicited for assistance 

in promotion, such as APHA student organizations and national schools of public health. 

Incentives: Each submission category (injury and violence prevention professional, 

student, and general public) had an award of $500; $1,500 in total.

Evaluation: The submissions from the video competition were judged by a panel of 12 

judges, consisting of CDC Injury Center leadership, topic-specific subject matter experts, 

communications staff, and leaders in partner agencies (the Safe States Alliance and 

National Public Health Information Council). These judges scored each video against the 

weighted judging criteria (creativity, use of injury or violence prevention topic, 

communication of positive prevention message, length, and audio and video quality). 

Partnerships: No formal partnerships were initiated for the “Seeing My World through a 

Safer Lens” challenge. However, a number of grantees and partners agreed to share 

messaging and promotion of the competition. 

Resources: Funds were allocated from program funds dedicated to activities for 

commemoration of the Injury Center’s 20th anniversary.

Results: The goal of the “Seeing My World through a Safer Lens” video competition is to 

increase public education about how violence and injuries are preventable. As a leading 

cause of death for people under the age of 44, the competition aimed to allow people to 

see how people are implementing scientifically-based prevention strategies where they 

live, work, or play. The video competition resulted in advancing the Injury Center’s 

vision of preventing violence and injuries and their consequences, by moving from 

science into action. By bringing together a diverse group of people, invested in stopping 

injuries and violence and their associated consequences, the video competition

succeeded in showing that CDC’s science-based approaches can be implemented at any 

level, within any environment. These winning videos will be used as examples of how 

digital technology, social media, and social sharing can set an example for positive 

communications messaging around injury and violence topic areas.

4.17. Million Hearts Caregiver Video Challenge

Overview: CDC and Prevention and the Million HeartsTM initiative invited family 

caregivers to participate in a video competition that offered $1,000 in prize money. 

Million HeartsTM is a five-year initiative launched by the Department of Health and 

Human Services with a goal of preventing one million heart attacks and strokes in the 

United States over the next five years. CDC and Million HeartsTM invited people who help 

to prevent or control high blood pressure or maintain the heart health of a loved one to 

share their stories of care giving by creating short, original videos. The videos showed 

the variety of ways a caregiver contributes to another person’s heart health and 

provided helpful tips related to high blood pressure prevention and control. The video 
69

challenge engaged the caregiver community and promoted heart disease prevention 

through blood pressure control, medication adherence, and lifestyle changes.

Website: 

http://millionhearts.challenge.gov/

Problem Statement: Heart attack and stroke are the first and fourth leading causes of 

death in the United States. High blood pressure, one of the major risk factors for heart 

disease, can be prevented and controlled. Family caregivers play an important role in 

helping their loved ones prevent and control high blood pressure. The competition 

invited family caregivers to share their stories of care giving by creating original, 

compelling videos that are less than two minutes long. The videos were required to 

include a description of how the caregiver contributes to another person's heart health 

and helpful tips related to high blood pressure prevention or control. 

Goal: Public education to raise awareness of the role of caregivers and family members 

in preventing and controlling high blood pressure.

Why a Prize as Preferred Method: In the area of health, video competitions function as a 

tool to promote interest and engagement in public health topics. They drive the public 

to present creative ideas and innovative solutions while raising awareness and 

educating audiences on a public health issue. The competition was a tool for Million 

HeartsTM to use to reach out to and interact with a key audience through a new, 

compelling mechanism not yet used by their initiative. 

Participants: CDC hoped to mobilize family caregivers. This challenge received two 

eligible submissions: one from Chicago, Illinois and one from Henderson, Nevada.

Timeline:

Solicitation Open – 7/16/2012 

Solicitation Close – 8/31/2012 

Winners Announced – 10/8/2012 

Solicitation and Outreach Methods and Results: CDC used the following methods to 

market the video challenge: weekly social media posts on CDC’s and Million Hearts’TM

Facebook and Twitter accounts, two CDC Features on CDC.gov home page, a Federal

Register Notice published on July 9, a Million Hearts’TM web site home page posting, 

CDC’s GovDelivery e-mail listserv, and postings on video competition databases 

(onlinevideocontests.com, filmthenext.com). Million HeartsTM also encouraged their 

major partners, American Heart Association and Administration on Aging, among others, 

to promote the competition through their social media accounts and blog web sites. 

Various health-related blogs published content describing the challenge and leading the 

public to the challenge web site. There are many likely factors that may have 

contributed to low participation, such as promotion efforts that did not reach the target 
70

audience, an insufficient submission period of six weeks, and discouraging criteria and 

standards for submissions for amateur video producers.

Incentives: The winning videos were promoted through CDC and Million Hearts social 

media channels. $1,000 total cash prizes funded by the CDC Foundation, an 

independent, non-profit organization, donated all prize money to CDC via the Outreach 

and Partnership Fund.

Evaluation: A panel of three judges evaluated the videos by scoring each against criteria 

including appropriateness, storytelling, quality of video, and potential to impact others.

Partnerships: Million HeartsTM reached out to their major public and non-profit partners 

for help in promoting the competition on their social media outlets and web sites. Many 

nonprofit, federal, and state health agencies shared social media posts on Facebook and 

Twitter, or shared information about the competition through blogs and web sites. CDC 

also partnered with the CDC Foundation, which donated prize money.

Resources: Some personnel time. Prize purse was donated by the CDC Foundation, 

graphics were created in-house, and free marketing channels were used.

Results: The competition web site and subsequent online marketing materials were 

written to present the requirements for submissions, to encourage participation, and to 

educate the public on the Million HeartsTM initiative and heart disease prevention. 

Results from tracking social media activity show these posts led over 2,500 people to 

the competition web site throughout the submission period from July 16 to August 31, 

2012. These social media messages, viewed by over a hundred thousand “followers” of 

CDC social media, were often shared by other Federal agencies and national partners 

who have thousands of their own followers. Despite the low number of submissions, the 

winning videos successfully provided tips on how to prevent and control high blood 

pressure and described the role of a family caregiver. The first place winner, in 

particular, used an innovative approach through motion info-graphics to describe how a 

caregiver helps a loved one maintain their heart health. 

5. Department of Labor

5.1. Equal Pay App Challenge

Overview: The National Equal Pay Task Force and DOL engaged innovators, educators,

and IT developers to help build innovative tools to educate the public about the gender 

pay gap and promote equal pay for women.

Website: 

http://equalpay.challenge.gov/
71

Problem Statement: Nearly 50 years after President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, 

women are still paid less than their male counterparts for doing comparable jobs. This 

pay gap means that each time the average woman starts a new job, she’s likely to start 

from a lower base salary, and that, over time, the pay gap between her and her male 

colleagues is likely to grow. For the average working woman, the pay gap means she will 

receive $150 less in her weekly paycheck, $8,000 less at the end of the year, and 

$380,000 less over her lifetime. For women of color and women with disabilities, the 

disparity is even bigger.

Goal: DOL wanted to engage leaders in academia, non-profit organizations, industry 

innovators, IT professionals, and other equal pay supporters to use publicly available 

labor data and other online resources to educate users about the pay gap and develop 

tools to promote equal pay. DOL’s four primary goals were to provide greater access to 

pay data by gender, race, and ethnicity; provide tools for early career coaching; improve 

education on negotiation; and promote online mentoring. 

Why a Prize as Preferred Method: DOL employed a prize competition to tap into the 

pools of talented developers, educators, innovators, and industry leaders from across 

the country who traditionally do not participate in Government IT development or 

mission-specific exercises. Challenge organizers wanted to collaborate directly with new 

and established innovators that typically do not participate as traditional stakeholders. 

Participants: DOL wanted to collaborate with people who participate in creating new, 

groundbreaking online platforms and technologies, and are experts in developing 

mobile applications. The DOL Equal Pay App Challenge was supported by over 1,500 

individuals, received 12 qualified submissions, and resulted in seven winners.

Solicitation and Outreach Methods and Results: DOL utilized the Challenge.gov platform 

to host and launch the DOL Equal Pay App competition. The Department used multiple 

methods to market the challenge, including press releases and social media. 

Additionally, DOL created a dedicated website, http://developer.dol.gov/, which housed 

APIs, SDKs and sample code for multiple platforms to ensure developer success.

Incentives: All prizes offered to winners originated from non-Federal entities. 

Evaluation: DOL’s evaluation process was composed of internal and external evaluation

panels and included five evaluation drivers: (1) Creativity, innovation, and ease of use;

(2) Promotion of access to important data and resources; (3) Usability by users with 

different skill sets and language preferences; (4) Consideration of partnerships that will 

ensure sustainability of the app; and (5) Ability to reach a variety of audiences.

Partnerships: The challenge was developed and executed through an internal 

partnership among DOL component agencies. Private sector partners included Women 
72

Innovate Mobile, Carnegie Mellon University, Google, The Daily Muse, Salary.com, 

Interview Street and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). 

Resources: Resources used for the development, execution, and management of the

competition included staff time.

Results: The Equal Pay App Challenge on Challenge.gov advanced DOL’s mission by 

leveraging existing program information, technology, and public innovation to raise 

awareness on equal pay and provide effective tools for employers and employees. The 

competition amplified the Equal Pay Taskforce’s mission on wage equality by expanding 

the amount of quality online tools, effective messaging and partnerships with nontraditional stakeholders in the academic and digital spectrum. The competition was 

featured on multiple media outlets including Forbes, The Daily Muse, New York Times, 

and Sacramento Bee, in addition to other online publications and mainstream blogs. 

5.2. Disability Employment App Challenge

Overview: The competition asked developers to help build innovative tools to improve 

employment opportunities and outcomes for people with disabilities. 

Website: 

http://disability.challenge.gov/

Problem Statement: Nearly twenty-two years after the passage of the Americans with 

Disabilities Act and thirty-nine years after the passage of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 

– two of the most significant disability employment-related pieces of legislation in 

American history – people with disabilities continue to be employed at much lower 

levels than the general population. Not only do people with disabilities have a 

significantly higher unemployment rate than the general population, they also have a 

much lower labor force participation rate. According to the most recent data from the 

Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (April 2012), people with disabilities 

had a 20.3% labor force participation rate compared to 69.1% for their non-disabled 

peers, and people with disabilities had an unemployment rate of 12.5% compared to 

7.6% for their non-disabled peers. For minorities with disabilities, these disparities are 

even greater. This represents a significant loss of willing and able talent to the American 

workforce, loss of income for people without jobs, and economic loss to the country.

Goal: DOL wanted to leverage technology in innovative ways to promote recruitment 

resources for employers, develop job-training and skill-building tools for job seekers, 

facilitate employment-related transportation options, and expand web and Information 

Communication Technology (ICT) accessibility.

Why a Prize as Preferred Method: DOL employed a prize competition to tap into the 

pools of talented developers across the country that traditionally do not participate in 
73

government IT development or mission-specific exercises. Challenge organizers wanted 

to collaborate directly with new and established innovators that typically do not 

participate as traditional stakeholders. 

Participants: DOL wanted to collaborate with people who participate in creating new, 

groundbreaking online platforms and technologies, and are experts in developing 

mobile applications. The DOL Disability Employment App Challenge was supported by 

over 2,400 individuals and received over 30 submissions.

Solicitation and Outreach Methods and Results: DOL utilized Challenge.gov to host and 

launch the DOL Disability Employment App competition. The Department used multiple 

methods to market the challenge, including press releases and social media via its Open 

Government Blog and Facebook and Twitter accounts. DOL additionally created a 

dedicated website, http://developer.dol.gov/, that housed APIs, SDKs and sample code 

for multiple platforms to ensure developer success.

Incentives: Competition prizes were offered in monetary form and as invitations to the 

FCC developer event, “Developing with Accessibility,” in Washington, DC on September 

6 – 7

th, 2012. The prizes awarded totaled $10,000: a first place prize of $5,000; a second 

place prize of $3,000; and a third place prize of $2,000. 

Evaluation: A two-phase judging process assessed submissions against several criteria: 

(1) alignment with mission, (2) creativity, (3) ease of use, (4) provided access to 

important data and resources, (5) attractive users with different skill sets and language 

preferences, (6) accessibility, (7) partnerships, and (8) audiences targeted. The final 

judging panel was made up of DOL, the Department of Education, Social Security 

Administration, and private sector industry leaders including IBM, Craig Newmark, and 

the Assistive Technology Industry Association (ATIA).

Partnerships: The challenge was developed and executed through an internal 

partnership between DOL component agencies. Challenge organizers also partnered 

with the U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Social Security Administration. Private 

sector partners included IBM, ATIA, and Craig Newmark. 

Resources: Resources used for the development, execution, and management of this 

competition included staff time various DOL component agencies. 

Results: The DOL Disability Employment App Challenge on Challenge.gov advanced 

DOL’s mission by leveraging existing technology and public innovation to raise public 

awareness about disability employment tools for employers and employees, including 

employer compliance with federal workplace laws, speech augmentation tools, 508 

compliant applications, and disability-focused job boards. Three prizes were awarded, 

one in each of the following categories: innovation, public voting, and accessibility. A 

description of each winner is below:
74

 Innovation Award Winner: Access Jobs. Access Jobs is a job search portal specifically 

designed for job seekers with disabilities. The website implements usable 

accessibility techniques, such as responsive design, which allow the website to be 

experienced in the same way across all platforms. 

 The People’s Choice Award Winner: VoisPal – Speak as You Think! VoisPal is an 

Android-based Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) app designed to 

help people with speech difficulties. 

 Above and Beyond Accessibility Award Winner: AccDC: Accelerated Dynamic

Content. AccDC is a scalable, cross-browser and cross-platform compatible Dynamic 

Content Management System that automates the rendering of dynamic content to 

ensure accessibility for screen reader and keyboard only users.

6. Department of State

6.1. Innovations in Arms Control Challenge

Overview: A smaller, faster-paced world is changing the security landscape, and these 

changes will bring with them new challenges and evolutions in current threats. To 

respond to these changes, the Department of State must adapt instruments of 

statecraft to bring to bear the networks, technologies, and human potential of their 

increasingly inter-dependent and interconnected world. In this spirit, on August 28, 

2012, the Department of State launched the Innovation in Arms Control

Challenge asking Americans: "How Can the Crowd Support Arms Control Transparency 

Efforts?" Challenge organizers invited America to share their ideas on ways commonly 

available technologies can support arms control policy. Challenge organizers see great 

value in incorporating innovative ideas across the whole spectrum of their arms control 

initiatives. As the Department of State looks to the future of arms control, new thinking 

to face the challenges of the 21st century is vital to their success, keeping in mind the big 

challenges that come about as challenge organizers move to reduce nuclear weapons to 

lower numbers, and look for ways to monitor smaller units of account, such as chemical 

munitions in storage facilities. 

Website: 

http://www.state.gov/t/avc/innovationcompetition/index.htm

http://challenge.gov/State/394-innovation-in-arms-control-challenge

Problem Statement: How Can the Crowd Support Arms Control Transparency Efforts? 

This challenge asked for creative ideas from the general public to use commonly 

available devices to help confirm whether states are complying with treaties or 

international arrangements addressing weapons and nonproliferation. Treaties or 

international arrangements addressing weapons, nonproliferation, and confidencebuilding measures are generally known as “arms control.” They are diplomatic tools that 

governments use to regulate weapons (especially weapons of mass destruction), or to 
75

increase transparency, predictability, and stability. These treaties or international 

arrangements support mutual security and stability in general, however, in some 

situations one or more parties may be motivated to violate these arms control 

provisions, commonly understood as “cheating.” This broad challenge question was an 

“Ideation Challenge,” formulated to obtain access to new ideas, similar to a global 

brainstorm for producing a breakthrough idea or market survey which may include ideas 

for a new product line, a new commercial application for a current product, or even a 

viral marketing idea to recruit new customers. Solvers were asked to provide ideas that 

included a description of the proposed mechanism or idea to support arms control 

transparency efforts; rationale for why the proposed idea will work in the real world; 

and any supporting information, publications, real-world use cases, or examples that 

reinforce the validity of the proposed idea.

Goal: The primary objective of the challenge was to discover new approaches and ideas 

on ways commonly available technologies can support arms control policy, to bolster 

interest in the general public on arms control issues, and to stimulate useful outside 

thinking that could provide additional transparency and information related to 

compliance with arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament regimes.

Why a Prize as Preferred Method: Prize competitions can stimulate attention and 

encourage innovation in a highly leveraged and results-focused way. Incentives improve

the performance of problem-solvers and mobilize new talent and ideas. 

Participants: This challenge asked for creative ideas from across the general public, from 

garage tinkerers and technologists, to gadget entrepreneurs and students, to support 

the U.S. arms control and nonproliferation agenda. 565 registered solvers submitted 67 

solutions. Of the solvers who registered, 24 were from universities including 

Georgetown, MIT, Princeton, Brown, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, UC Berkeley, 

Iowa State, and University of Michigan. 

Although participation was limited to U.S. Citizens and permanent residents under the 

America COMPETES authority, challenge organizers received a lot of interest and 

positive feedback from foreign publics. While continuously working to achieve their 

Department’s overall mission of international engagement, challenge organizers 

discovered an inability to locate the appropriate authority to engage international 

publics on prize incentive challenges. For future Department of State prize incentive 

challenges, challenge organizers are considering using existing procurement or grant 

authority language in order to carry out the Department of State’s overall mission of 

engaging foreign publics while also soliciting innovative proposals that could aid the U.S. 

government by providing additional transparency and information related to 

compliance with existing or future arms control, nonproliferation and disarmament 

regimes. An amendment to the reauthorization of the America COMPETES Act could 

help alleviate the restrictions on engaging foreign publics under the existing authority. 
76

This would facilitate the Department of State’s ability to reach out to an international 

audience of potential competition participants.

Timeline:

Challenge Open – 08/28/12

Challenge Close – 10/26/12

Solicitation and Outreach Methods and Results: On August 28, 2012, the U.S. 

Department of State issued an official announcement on the Federal Register and sent 

out a press release on the Innovation in Arms Control Challenge. Rose Gottemoeller, 

Acting Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, also posted 

about the challenge on the Department’s official blog and the White House’s Office of 

Science and Technology Policy’s blog.

53 These releases were further amplified through 

various social media channels inside and outside the Administration. Acting Under 

Secretary Gottemoeller participated in an interview with Popular Mechanics and CNN 

about the competition and later received wide attention. The announcement of the 

State Department challenge was also picked up by regional television and newspaper 

outlets, including the Washington Post.

Incentives: The awards will be paid to the best submission(s) as solely determined by 

the State Department. The total payout will be $10,000, with at least one award being 

no smaller than $5,000 and no award being smaller than $1,000. 

Evaluation: Solutions will be reviewed in two rounds of technical reviews. After 

analyzing the technical reviews, finalists will be chosen by a small coordination group 

based on their composite weighted score. The Judging Criteria was organized into the 

following three categories: applicability, feasibility, and supporting documentation.

Partnerships: None

Resources: The prize challenge was funded from the Department of State’s External 

Research Board (REB) on behalf of the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and 

International Security.

Results: The competition was still open as of the end of FY 2012, so the final results of 

the competition will be reported in the FY 2013 prizes report to Congress. To date, the 

Challenge has brought more awareness of arms control issues to the American public, 

particularly on the challenge’s focus on the applicability of commonly available devices 

and social networking tools to arms control policy.

 

53 http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/09/05/challengegov-two-years-and-200-prizes-later
77

7. Small Business Administration

7.1. Small Business Week Video Contest

Overview: In celebration of National Small Business Week 2012, the SBA sought creative 

videos from small businesses that showed how they had been assisted by an SBA 

program or service (counseling, training, guaranteed loans, government contracts, 

disaster recovery, etc.). The video competition showcased amazing small businesses 

across the country. These businesses are creating jobs and the next big products that 

will help keep America competitive.

Website:

http://smallbizvid.challenge.gov/ 

Problem Statement: For most entrepreneurs and small businesses, the Federal 

government has useful programs and services, but small businesses often do not know 

that these programs are available.

Goal: To educate the public about how SBA programs and services help entrepreneurs 

and small business owners start, grow, and succeed.

Why a Prize as Preferred Method: Through Challenge.gov, SBA was able to collect video 

success stories at zero cost to the agency. 

Participants: The competition was opened to SBA-assisted small businesses in the 

United States and its territories including, but not limited to, Puerto Rico, the U. S. Virgin 

Islands and Guam. The business owner(s) must have been a U.S. citizen or permanent 

resident and be at least 18 years old to enter and win. Small businesses must have met 

SBA's size standards and must have used at least one SBA program or service. 

Timeline: The challenge was launched on April 16, 2012. The video submission deadline 

was May 15, 2012. The judging process was from May 16-19, 2012. The winners were 

announced and the challenge concluded on May 23, 2012.

Solicitation and Outreach Methods and Results: 

SBA marketed the challenge successfully through social media (Twitter and Facebook), 

mail marketing (GovDelivery), and press releases/news advisories.

Incentives: Winning videos were shown during a Google+ Hangout hosted by SBA and 

the White House with SBA Administrator Karen Mills on May 23, 2012. The winners 

were invited to participate in the Hangout with Administrator Mills. 

Evaluation: SBA’s successful evaluation criteria included: length, format, educational 

content, story, reference to SBA program or services, and originality. 
78

Partnerships: SBA and the White House cohosted the winners announcement.

Resources: There were no funding costs associated with this challenge. The resources 

SBA used included staff time.

Results: The SBA received 103 video submissions. Of those 103 videos, 73 were eligible. 

SBA posted the eligible videos at www.sba.gov/stories to illustrate to the public how 

SBA programs and services help entrepreneurs and small businesses.

7.2. Apps for Entrepreneurs Competition

Overview: The Apps for Entrepreneurs Competition challenged individuals or teams to 

create apps to help small businesses and entrepreneurs navigate the Federal 

government more efficiently.

Website: 

http://entrepreneurs.challenge.gov/

Problem Statement: For most entrepreneurs and small businesses, the Federal 

government has useful programs and services, but it can be hard to identify, engage, 

and navigate Federal websites. Often, small businesses do not know that the Federal 

government already offers a program that they would find useful. Entrepreneurs and 

small businesses need better tools to navigate the Federal government’s vast resources 

– including programs, services, and procurement opportunities. Eligible entrants were 

asked to create apps to help small businesses and entrepreneurs navigate the Federal 

Government more efficiently.

Goal: The Apps for Entrepreneurs Competition was an SBA initiative to help make 

Federal government programs and information more useful to small businesses. The 

Competition provided recognition to individuals or teams of individuals for developing 

innovative applications designed for the Web, a personal computer, a mobile handheld 

device, console, or any platform broadly accessible on the open internet that utilize data 

which is freely available on Federal government websites.

Why a Prize as Preferred Method: For the SBA, it was important to test and validate the 

challenge concept with open government data. While contracts and grants may have 

been great for targeted work, the challenge platform was seen as an opportunity to 

encourage innovation from the developer community on ideas that the SBA.gov team 

could further develop into useful features for their current web properties.

Participants: The agency hoped to mobilize entrepreneurs to build apps that were 

relevant to their own communities with business data. Geographic distribution of 

submissions was broad. Generally, the participants were either independent, freelance 

developers, or small firms that wanted to showcase their expertise. 
79

Timeline: Challenge opened 11/05/11; closed 11/20/11; winners announced 11/23/11 

Solicitation and Outreach Methods and Results: The Agency used traditional marketing 

channels/tactics – including blog posts, social media outreach, and press releases. 

Additionally, SBA entered into a contract with a local firm to create a hackathon to bring 

together developers to experiment with ideas for apps. SBA also worked with others in 

the developer community to spread the word via email list and other relevant channels.

Incentives: There were seven prizes available: one $5,000 gift card; three $3,000 gift 

cards; and three $2,000 gift cards. The total value of the monetary prizes was $20,000. 

Evaluation: The Judging panel was composed of 10 individuals with expertise in 

technology, small business, and entrepreneurship from both the public and private 

sectors. The Judging panel evaluated the screened submissions based these criteria: use 

of required data; technical implementation; mission and impact; and creativity. 

Partnerships: None 

Resources: Staff time, and about $50K in contractor resources, including the prize purse.

Results: The challenge roughly 30 valid submissions. The completion of the challenge 

was a proof-of-concept exercise, where the SBA learned how to execute other 

challenges.
80

APPENDIX 2: AGENCY PROGRAMS CONDUCTED UNDER AUTHORITIES OTHER THAN THE AMERICA 

COMPETES REAUTHORIZATION ACT OF 2010

This Appendix provides a summary of some prizes and challenges conducted in FY 2012 

under agency prize authorities other than COMPETES and does not include any of the 

multiple prize competitions conducted under other authorities in FY 2012 or prior. 

LIST OF CHALLENGES

8. National Aeronautics and Space Administration 

8.1. Technology Demonstration: Sample Return Robot Challenge

8.2. Theoretical Challenge: Strain Measurement of Vectran and Kevlar 

Webbing

8.3. Ideation Challenge: Big Data Challenge

8.4. Ideation Challenge: Rice Business Plan Competition (RBPC)

8.5. App Development: Android Electrocardiography (ECG)

8.6. App Development: Planetary Data System Challenge

8.7. Apps Contest/Mass Collaboration: International Space Apps Challenge

8.8. Video Challenge: Venus Transit Video Time Capsule Challenge

8.9. Video Challenge/ Education Challenge: Zero Robotics Challenges

8.10. Education Challenge: NASA Great Moonbuggy Race

8.11. Education Challenge: NASA Student Launch Projects (SLP)

8.12. Education Challenge: Lunabotics Mining Competition

8.13. NASA Tournament Lab

8.14. NASA Innovation Pavilion

9. National Institute of Standards and Technology

9.1. NIST SHA-3 Hash Competition

10. Department of Defense

10.1. Army Challenge: Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge

10.2. Air Force Challenges: Fuel Scrubber; Grey Data; Durable Dielectrics on 

Polycarbonate; Energetic Core-Nanocluster Production

10.3. DARPA Challenges: Cash for Locating and Identifying Quick Response; Shredder

8.1 Technology Demonstration: Sample Return Robot Challenge

The NASA Sample Return Robot Challenge called upon robotics innovators to build a 

robot that could autonomously locate, identify, and collect a variety of samples and 

then return the samples to a designated point without reliance on GPS or other 

terrestrial navigation aids. Offering a prize permitted NASA to explore multiple solutions 

and to pay only for achievement of the goals. 
81

Eleven teams registered to compete. Three were small robotics companies, two were 

from universities, and six were small teams of robotics enthusiasts. Competitors were 

required to demonstrate achievement of competition requirements according to the 

rules. A judging team measured the robot sample collection and retrieval performance 

in person at the demonstration event. 

The Challenge drew novel approaches from non-traditional sources. There were no 

winners in 2012. The competition was also the cornerstone of a large-scale public 

outreach effort that attracted over 7,000 guests to the competition and provided NASA 

with the opportunity to educate the public on NASA robotics and Mars exploration 

efforts. The competition documentary podcast has been downloaded over 500,000 

times and continues to be rebroadcast on NASA TV and is accessible on many online 

sources such as iTunes. The competition is being repeated in 2013. 

8.2 Strain Measurement of Vectran and Kevlar Webbing

The NASA Strain Measurement of Vectran and Kevlar Webbing Challenge looked for a 

new method to measure strain on Kevlar and Vectran straps in the 25 to 125°C range. 

Inflatable structures are being researched as a means for long-duration human 

habitation in space. The structural restraint layers of the current designs are made from 

straps that are stitched together to form webbing. NASA performs creep tests (strain)

on webbing materials of woven Vectran and Kevlar straps. Currently, a photogrammetry 

technique is used to determine the elongation of the test specimen. A photogrammetry 

technique works well at room temperature for all the straps, but at elevated 

temperatures, the technique only works for some of the straps. Twisting and bulging of 

the fibers on some samples causes the breakdown of the pattern used for 

photogrammetry, which results in the loss of the strain data. A technique is needed to 

accurately measure the strain in these samples, given the fiber movement. This 

challenge was instituted under NASA’s contract with Innocentive. Offering a prize 

permitted Innocentive to explore multiple solutions and to only pay for achievement of 

successful solutions. Other approaches would have required selection and funding 

based on proposals and would have provided no assurance that payment would result in 

successful demonstrations. Results will not be announced until early January 2013.

 

8.3 Big Data Challenge

The Big Data Challenge is applying the process of Open Innovation to the goal of 

conceptualizing new and novel approaches to utilizing “Big Data” information sets 

residing in various agency silos while remaining consistent with individual United States 

agencies missions related to the field of health, energy, and earth sciences. NASA is 

collaborating with the National Science Foundation (NSF), Networking and Information 

Technology Research and Development (NITRD), and the DOE’s Office of Science in 

building publicly-accessible means to access multiple disparate government data 

sources, some very large, to promote “Data to Knowledge to Action.” The first Big Data 
82

Challenge focused on cross cutting ideas and yielded 141 registrants, 16 total 

submissions, and 5 winners at $750 each. Judges for these entries came from a diverse 

expertise set including academia, the government and commercial companies. Each 

winner received a 30% bonus for using streaming data. The second Big Data Challenge 

focused on energy data and yielded 54 registrants, 14 total submissions, and 3 winners 

at $500 each. Judges for these entries came from a diverse set of places including 

academia, the Federal government and non-profit entities. Each winner received a 30% 

bonus for using streaming data. The third, ongoing Big Data Challenge is focusing on 

earth science data. It yielded 45 registrants and 8 total submissions. 

8.4 Rice Business Plan Competition 

NASA’s Human Health and Performance Directorate (HH&P) at Johnson Space Center 

has sponsored a $20,000 prize for the past five years at the Rice Business Plan 

Competition, an internationally recognized student business plan competition held at 

Rice University in Houston, Texas. Forty-two student teams enter the competition each 

year. The HH&P prize focuses on new and emerging health and performance based 

technologies and it represents the recognition of the development of a new business, 

small business innovation, and the entrepreneurial spirit. Each company is 

commercializing a health-related technology that will improve medical care capabilities 

on Earth and have potential application to human spaceflight. The HH&P prize has gone 

to Heart Sounds, Integrated Diagnostics, GlucoGo (subsequently named LyoGo), 

Diagenetix, and Innovostics. 

Heart Sounds is commercializing a technology that would allow the non-physician to 

monitor heart beats and was focused on rural and third world country pre-natal care but

would have obvious application to spaceflight with non-physician crewmembers and 

autonomous healthcare required for exploration. Integrated Diagnostics is developing 

and commercializing lab on chip technology that would allow multiple laboratory tests 

to be done on a single sample in a very small compact analysis device with the target 

market being the physician’s office, and portable diagnostics needs of rural healthcare 

and third world countries with obvious application to the in-flight diagnostics during 

current ISS missions as well as exploration. LyoGo is commercializing a technology that 

in a single use administration device allows lyophilized drugs (dried to a powder form 

which increases portability and shelf life) to be kept separate from the mixing solution 

until the time of injection. This technology overcomes measurement and mixing error by 

the operator or patient and is directly applicable to rural and third world country 

healthcare and is of interest for exploration class spaceflight missions. LyoGo now has 

Series A venture funding. Diagenetix, Inc. is a molecular diagnostics company that 

developed a platform enabling quick, gene-specific detection of pathogens without 

expensive or complicated instrumentation, thereby increasing the accessibility of 

diagnostics. The gene dart technology is very promising for real-time identification of 

bacterial pathogens on surfaces, water, etc. during spaceflight. Since this was developed 

for agriculture, the company now has a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant. 
83

Innovostics is a for-profit social venture providing point-of-care diagnostic technologies 

to save patient lives around the globe. Using a unique microfluidics platform and design, 

tests will provide accurate, inexpensive, and rapid results with only a finger prick of 

blood. They are currently developing the InfectDx, a diagnostic test to differentiate 

between bacterial, viral, and parasitic infection.

Many ideation prizes focus on getting new ideas for existing problems. This prize 

example is unique from many ideation competitions in that it leverages an existing 

competition to draw entrepreneur’s attention to NASA problems. This competition is 

not run on an online platform like many other ideation prizes; instead it involves inperson development and judging. The model of participating in existing business plan 

competitions could be compared to and considered along with online crowdsourcing 

approaches to identify new ideas and business plans through a prize competition.

8.5 Android Electrocardiography

The NASA Tournament Lab Mobile ECG Challenge asked competitors to design and build 

a mobile Android based ECG application capable of displaying and recording a 12 lead 

ECG signal collected via a Bluetooth signal. ECG measurements are important in 

diagnostic and research areas of human health both on Earth and in space. In many 

areas of the world and in space medical hardware is difficult to transport or obtain. 

Thus, NASA challenged competitors to use existing, readily available hardware platforms 

to develop a software application that would create a monitoring option without 

needing new hardware. This was a unique challenge because is required a blend of 

hardware and UI programming skills to participate. These combined skills sets can be 

difficult to find. The prize approach used for this challenge found a total of 53 

registrants. Through the challenge nine entrants — who had combined skills sets that 

NASA might not traditionally have ready access to — provided 22 unique submissions. 

There were 6 total winning entries from 4 unique submitters from 3 countries. NASA is 

working to ready the winning solutions for Agency use. 

8.6 Planetary Data System Challenge

The NASA Planetary Data System is an archive that hosts terabytes of valuable data from 

hundreds of data sources and spans decades of research. Data is maintained by a 

federation of 10 teams organized into nodes across the United States. While PDS data is 

available publically through its various websites, effective use requires deep familiarity 

with the data, data structure, and federated organization. In order to better realize the 

value of this national resource, PDS posted challenges through the NASA Tournament 

Lab on TopCoder.com in 2011 to design and build a homogenous access layer that 

better serves both scientists and citizens. The goals of the competition were to leverage 

the new PDS data access layer to develop new applications that showcase valuable PDS 

data and demonstrate how it could be used in scientific, educational, and social settings.
84

This challenge produced Android, iPad, and iPhone applications. Two applications 

leveraged PDS data for high school lessons, aligned to Core Curriculum standards, and 

one of these is an interactive Augmented Reality platform. The series also included two 

applications developed by high school students, one of which combined PDS data with 

social network themes allowing individuals to see the data their friends are looking at, 

and share it. The challenges enabled student engagement while producing applications 

that were both fun to use and novel.

8.7 International Space Apps Challenge

The International Space Apps Challenge featured 71 challenges related to how NASA 

explores space and improves life on Earth. The challenge was an international 

hackathon-style event that took place over a 48-hour period in cities on all seven 

continents on the weekend of April 21, 2012. 

The problem statements in open hardware, open software, data visualization, and 

citizen science were developed from within NASA, from partner agencies and 

organizations, and from public submissions. Teams were encouraged to submit

solutions to address any of the featured challenges, and 101 solutions were received at 

the end of the 48-hour global event. 

The goals of the International Space Apps Challenge were to:

1. Create new technologies and approaches that can solve some of the key challenges 

of NASA as well as making current efforts more cost-effective (e.g., conduct science, 

forecast terrestrial and space weather, monitor climate change, understand earth 

science applications, and support disaster response and recovery).

2. Exercise a government’s interest in using open data and technology, in partnership 

with others, to address global needs, and extend the use of space data and 

technology for additional applications. 

3. Engage citizens in countries with little or no investments in space exploration to 

contribute to space exploration through open source, open data, and code 

development.

4. Promote Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education by 

encouraging students from around the world to utilize open technology for solutions 

to global challenges.

5. Encourage international partnership and mutual understanding.

6. Demonstrate a commitment to the principles of the Open Government Partnership.

The first International Space Apps Challenge offered seven challenges specific to 

satellite hardware and payloads, including submissions from at least two commercial 

organizations. These challenges received multiple solutions in the areas of satellite 

tracking, suborbital payloads, command and control systems, and leveraging 

commercial smartphone technology for orbital remote sensing. These were 

enthusiastically embraced in the wider community, particularly among the Makers. 
85

The International Space Apps Challenge engaged a diverse group of people to contribute 

toward NASA’s objectives of expanding human knowledge of Earth and space, improving 

spaceflight technology as well as making it more efficient, utilizing and extending NASA’s 

scientific and engineering data and resources, and doing this in cooperation with other 

nations. The Challenge also invested in strengthening pockets of innovation, 

encouraging STEM utilization, and mobilizing these resources for the Administration’s 

priorities. There were six winning apps, but the real “results” of the Challenge are a 

2,000+ person community engaged in and excited about space exploration, thinking 

creatively and technologically, and ready to apply that experience to challenges 

identified by the agency, all at relatively low cost and on a short timeline.

8.8 Venus Transit Video Time Capsule Challenge

NASA challenged participants to use existing footage and create video time capsules 

that tell the story of this Transit to be used as a message to future citizens in 2117 as 

they get ready to watch the next Venus Transit. The purpose of this competition was to 

create a 60 second video that combines provided footage of the 2012 Venus Transit 

with original footage to tell an original and amazing story. The ultimate goal was to raise 

awareness of the historical, educational, and scientific purpose of the last Venus Transit 

of this generation’s lifetime and to document, visually, this snapshot in time in order to 

provide perspective on what it was like to see it on earth in 2012.

The final deliverable from this competition produced a high quality video that serves as 

a video time capsule of the 2012 Venus. The first place video can be viewed here: 

http://tongal.com/work/4rauhc.

8.9 Zero Robotics Challenges

"Zero Robotics" (ZR) is an annual robotics programming competition where the robots 

are Synchronized Position Hold Engage Reorient Experimental Satellites (SPHERES) 

inside the International Space Station (ISS). Competitors learn, compete, and collaborate 

in programming the SPHERES to accomplish specific missions designed by the Zero 

Robotics Team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). After several phases 

of virtual competition, finalists are selected to compete in a live championship aboard 

the ISS. An astronaut will conduct the championship competition in microgravity with a 

live broadcast. While there are no prizes (other than a trophy) for the middle school and 

high school student competitions, two prize-based Zero Robotics competitions were 

conducted in 2012. First, the Zero Robotics Algorithm Challenges were open 

competitions conducted to develop the 2012 Zero Robotics game. Second, a 

promotional video was crowd-sourced using the Tongal Platform. The resulting video 

was propagated via social media and was the #7 viral video of the week. 

The challenge of the ZR Algorithm Challenges was to build the Zero Robotics 

infrastructure using TopCoder crowdsourcing competitions. At a high level, the 

development tasks undertaken using collaborative competition were: (a) integration of 
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a graphical editor; (b) development of the ZR community website; (c) development of 

the SPHERES integrated programming environment using the 2010 version as a 

prototype; and (4) integration of the SPHERES high-fidelity simulation into the TopCoder 

server compilation and testing “Farm”, which is the robust back-end handling and 

implementing the ZR simulation requests.

 

The objective of the promotional video competition was to generate a commercial that 

would best capture the interest of the “Zero Robotics Challenge” participants who are 

namely students (middle and high school), parents, and teachers. This video generation 

competition was dived into 3 phases. In the first phase, competitions submitted short 

descriptions (140 characters or less) on potential video ideas. The second phase 

captured pitches (storyboard and text) from the various ideas generated previously. The 

final phase was video production and submission.

The Zero Robotics Video Challenge Top video winner and MIT video has been added to 

the NASA YouTube channel. These two videos were used by Brand Ads to promote Zero 

Robotics on online gaming sites and Social Media sites. All edited winning videos are 

available for ZR use on website to promote HS and MS competitions. The winning video 

can be found here: http://tongal.com/work/53h1g6. 

8.10 NASA Great Moonbuggy Race

The 19th annual NASA Great Moonbuggy Race was held April 12-14, 2012, at the U.S. 

Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala. At this competition more than 70 student 

teams, many representing schools that field competitors year after year, demonstrated 

the same engineering skills and innovation that made NASA's Apollo-era lunar rover 

program a success four decades ago. The event challenges high school, college, and 

university students to design, build, and race lightweight, human-powered rovers –

"Moonbuggies" – which address challenges much like those faced by NASA's lunar rover 

developers in the late 1960s. The annual competition is designed to teach students to 

troubleshoot and solve problems; to demonstrate NASA's continuing commitment to 

inspiring new generations of scientists, engineers, and astronauts; to provide 

opportunities and support systems that recruit, retain, and develop high school and 

undergraduate students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)-

related disciplines; and to provide experiences that inspire student interest and 

achievement in STEM disciplines. 

8.11 NASA Student Launch Projects

The NASA Student Launch Projects annually challenges informal organizations and

middle school, high school, and college students to design, build, and launch a reusable 

rocket to one mile above ground level while carrying a scientific or engineering payload. 

SLP is comprised of two project elements: NASA Student Launch Initiative (SLI) for 

middle/high school/informal teams and NASA University Student Launch Initiative (USLI) 
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for community college and university teams. USLI is a competition where teams are 

scored on each element of the project. SLI is not a competition; however, teams must 

first place in the top of the Team America Rocketry Challenge (TARC) or the Rockets for 

Schools (R4S) competitions to be eligible to submit a proposal for participation in SLI. 

Any community college or university located in the United States is eligible to propose 

to participate in USLI. The challenge of SLP is to design, fabricate, test, and fly a highpowered rocket carrying a science or engineering payload to an altitude of one mile 

above ground level. Participating students are required to build and maintain a team 

website; submit and present a series of design reviews to a review panel of NASA 

engineers, scientists, and educators; and engage other students in hands-on educational 

activities. Approximately 500 students, educators and mentors participated in SLP in 

2011-2012. 

8.12 Lunabotics Mining Competition

NASA's Fourth Annual Lunabotics Mining Competition is an international university-level 

competition designed to engage and retain students in science, technology, engineering 

and mathematics (STEM). NASA encourages the development of innovative lunar 

excavation concepts from universities which may result in clever ideas and solutions 

which could be applied to an actual lunar excavation device or payload. The challenge is 

for students to design and build an excavator, called a Lunabot, that can mine and 

deposit a minimum of 10 kilograms of lunar simulant within 10 minutes. The 

complexities of the challenge include the abrasive characteristics of the BP-1, the weight 

and size limitations of the Lunabot, and the ability to telerobotically or autonomously 

control the Lunabot from a remote mission control center. The Lunabots cannot employ 

any fundamental physical processes (e.g., suction or water cooling in the open lunar 

environment), gases, fluids, or consumables that would not work in the lunar 

environment. The scoring for the mining category will require teams to consider a 

number of design and operation factors such as dust tolerance and projection, 

communications, vehicle mass, energy/power required, and full autonomy. 

To stir innovative technology ideas for excavating lunar soil, a necessary first step 

toward extracting resources from lunar soil and building bases on the moon, the 

students are required to design, build, test, and compete a Lunabot. Students compete 

for monetary awards in seven categories: on-site mining, systems engineering paper, 

presentation and demonstration, outreach project report, team spirit, and the overall 

grand prize The Joe Kosmo Award for Excellence. Winners for monetary awards are 

selected based on numerical scores for each category. Winner of the Joe Kosmo Award 

for Excellence also receive launch invitations, and travel expenses to a NASA field test. 

Onsite mining winners also receive launch invitations. There are also several nonmonetary award categories including: innovation, social media, and efficient use of 

communications. 
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8.13 NASA Tournament Lab 

The NASA Tournament Lab (NTL)54 continued to flourish in FY2012. A few highlights 

include the development of an Android ECG mobile app with implications for space and 

third-world medical application; development of several mobile apps that allow 

planetary observation data to be queried and inspected efficiently and quickly that 

included a smart app to support educators in the classroom; as well as launching a 

series of Big Data Challenges in support of the Government’s Networking and 

Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program. NASA worked 

closely with the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy on these 

Big Data challenges. Winners will be formally announced in January 2013. 

Unique to the NTL this year was the launch of a video competition to support the 2012 

Zero Robotics Challenge. The highest dollar winner of the competition produced a 

video55 that during the month of September was one of the top five viral videos. 

The NTL ends this successful year preparing to launch a challenge for the International 

Space Station (ISS) Program. The ISS Longeron Shadowing challenge will be a series of 

contests designed to bring a unique approach to determining if NASA can optimize 

power production from the solar arrays. 

8.14 NASA Innovation Pavilion

Another significant milestone is that NASA is once again up and running with challenges 

on its InnoCentive Innovation Pavilion.

56

 As FY2012 concluded, the Langley Research 

Center was putting the wraps on a theoretical challenge to find a new method to 

measure the strain on Kevlar and Vectran straps in the 25 to 125°C range to advance 

techniques for use in inflatable habitation structures. Fy2013 will bring the posting of a 

challenge to help find a device capable of measuring intracranial pressure in spaceflight 

to support research seeking ways to mitigate vision changes in astronauts. This 

challenge is unique in that NASA used its internal crowdsourcing tool, NASA@work as 

the starting point to gather information internal to NASA as well as using its technology 

scouting platform (yet2.com) to seek unique sources of understanding what 

technologies may be out there that meet a more mature technology readiness level. 

Launching the challenge on the Innovation Pavilion will lend yet another source of 

advancing research in a key focus area of human health and performance in space. The 

CoECI will be monitoring the results this next year with a keen focus on the lessons 

learned that result from this multi-platform approach. 

 

54 http://community.topcoder.com/ntl/

55 http://tongal.com/project/ZeroRobotics

56 https://www.innocentive.com/pavilion/NASA
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9. National Institute of Standards and Technology

9.1 NIST SHA-3 Hash Competition

In order to strengthen and ensure future information security NIST challenged the 

global cryptographic community to come up with a new cryptographic hash algorithm, 

SHA-3. Hash algorithms are used in numerous everyday transactions to authenticate and 

protect information. This major challenge allowed the NIST’s Computer Security Division

to tap into the best cryptography talent from around the world to help solve this critical 

challenge with the winners receiving the scientific and commercial recognition of being 

among the elite in their field. In addition to identifying the best SHA-3 algorithm, this 

competition has contributed to tremendous gains in the cryptography community 

regarding the general theory and understanding of hash algorithms, far beyond what 

NIST could have accomplished alone. 

A cryptographic hash algorithm is one of the fundamental tools of modern information 

security. It is a widely used tool that creates a “fingerprint” or a “message digest” of a 

file, message, or block of data that can be used for digital signatures, message 

authentication codes, and many other security applications in the information 

infrastructure. Following attacks that broke existing hash algorithms, in 2007 NIST 

decided that it was prudent to develop a new hash algorithm to augment and revise the 

Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 180–2, which specifies hash algorithms 

for Federal use and is widely adopted by the IT industry. The new hash algorithm would 

be referred to as ‘‘SHA–3’’, and would be developed through a public competition. NIST 

intended that SHA–3 would specify an unclassified, publicly disclosed algorithm(s), 

which would be available worldwide without royalties or other intellectual property 

restrictions, and would be capable of protecting sensitive information for decades. 

The worldwide cryptographic community provided an enormous amount of feedback 

throughout the competition. Most of the comments were sent to NIST and a public hash 

forum. in addition, many of the cryptanalysis and performance studies were published 

as papers in major cryptographic conferences or leading cryptographic journals. NIST 

also hosted three SHA-3 candidate conferences to obtain public feedback. 

Based on the public comments and internal review of the candidates, NIST announced 

Keccak as the winner of the SHA-3 Cryptographic Hash Algorithm Competition on 

October 2, 2012, and ended the five-year competition. The Keccak algorithm was 

created by Guido Bertoni, Joan Daemen and Gilles Van Assche of STMicroelectronics and 

Michael Peeters of NXP Semiconductors. Per the terms of the competition, SHA-3 will 

remain an unclassified, publicly disclosed algorithm available worldwide on a royalty 

free basis as a new security tool for network system designers.
90

10. Department of Defense

10.1 Army Challenge: Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge

The U.S. Army Sergeant First Class Paul Ray Smith Simulation and Training Technology 

Center of the Human Research and Engineering Directorate, U.S. Army Research 

Laboratory introduced the inaugural Federal Virtual Worlds Challenges (FVWC) in the 

summer of 2009 to reach a global research and developmental community.57 The goal 

was to explore a multitude of potential capabilities and developments within virtual 

environments. The demonstrated benefit of that first challenge to research in immersive 

environments resulted in the approval from the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the 

Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology for the continuation of FVWC as an 

annual event.

Following the Defense GameTech User’s Conference, winners had the opportunity to 

describe their solutions to USG users and policymakers during a panel session at the 

Federal Consortium of Virtual Worlds Conference. Some entries were already USGdeveloped projects that benefitted from further socialization and reuse within the 

industry. Various finalists built relationships with one another leading to working 

partnerships. Finalists included the Challenge results on resumes, product 

advertisements, and corporate achievements as a demonstration of expertise in the 

field. 

The Challenge was divided into two focus areas: ‘Engaging Learning Strategies’ and the 

‘Holodeck – Making It So’.

The Engaging Learning Strategies Focus Area – This focus area was a call for 

demonstrations of learning activities in virtual environments that depict effective 

strategies to engage learners. When entries were received in this focus area, they 

logically fell into three categories: Concept Building, Distributed Learning and 

Familiarization. A description of the finalists in each category follows.

In the Concept Building Category which included entries focused on presenting learning 

tasks in an immersive environment, the Grand Prize and First Place Winner was

“Interactive Graphic Novel Approach to Guided Learning. This battle care trainer 

demonstrates how basic battlefield trauma triage could be trained using interactive 

interface techniques provided on the iPad. In BattleCare, the learner plays the role of 

Airman Collins, who is the medic on duty in Gardez near the Afghanistan border. The 

 

57 All DOD prize summaries here are excerpted from the March 2013 Report from the 

Department of Defense Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, 

and Logistics to Congress on the Prizes for Advanced Technology Achievements Under Title 10, 

United States Code, Section 2374a. 
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learner, as Airman Collins, learns the basics of A-B-C – checking for Airway, Breathing 

and Circulation in a trauma patient. His mentor, Sergeant Rodriguez, allows Collins to 

make his own choices (Discovery Learning) but provides feedback on those choices 

(Guided Discovery). The episode begins with the arrival of the trauma case and ends 

with successful stabilization and helicopter evacuation of the patient. The rendering 

style, character positioning, and page layout is based on graphic novel conventions. 

Gesture-based interaction makes the learner feel like they are touching the patient. 

Exploration gives a sense of game play while the mentor’s guidance means that the 

learner does not get lose. Additional information on this entry can be found at 

http://www.clinispace.com/fvwc/Engagina Learning.html.

Distributed Learning Category - The Distributed Learning entries demonstrated 

instruction available to groups that supported collaboration and/or providing a 

distributed learning platform. 

First Place Winner: Creative Learning in a Wet Lab – This entry was developed to 

support small communities spread across the Alaskan Bush, some of which have no road 

access, to overcome a lack of infrastructure and trained lab assistants needed to provide 

a high quality, real time science lab. The virtual wet lab system provides a virtual 

"hands-on" lab environment where students can do a live lab together, regardless of 

physical location. Intuitive camera presets ease the frustration of trying to examine 

multiple objects in real time in order to complete labs in faster than real time. One lab 

allows students to instantly cross fruit fly traits and explore the fundamentals of 

Mendelian genetics. Another lab examines the DNA of a poached fish as students 

complete a 24 hour lab in 2 hours. A virtual world is used to re-conceptualize what it 

means to conduct a science lab: the student becomes a participant within whatever 

image or data they are observing. For example, by controlling time, students experience 

predatory natural selection as a bird hunting for food during 250 years of environmental 

change. Other labs, such as fermentation and biochemical evidence for evolution, delay 

reactions to enhance data collection. Students interact with altered time and virtual 

space as they develop essential lab skills that can be applied toward new situations in 

more advanced classes. Additional information on this entry can be found at 

http://www.pwscc.edu/academics/creative-learning-in-a-virtual-wet-lab/

Familiarization Category - The Familiarization category provided an immersive 

environment for learners to become familiar with physical spaces or to link concepts to 

physical spaces.

First Place Winner: United States Air Force Academy Browser Based 3D Virtual Campus 

Tour - The United States Air Force Academy (USAFA), located in Colorado Springs, 

Colorado, found that travel limitations hindered their ability to recruit potential cadets. 

They wanted an effective recruitment method that would eliminate inconvenience to 

these potential cadets or their families. USAFA found that virtual worlds could offer the 

ability to have a 3D virtual campus where potential cadets could walk around and learn 
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about culture, size, and beauty of the campus through an avatar. This immersive 3D 

virtual campus tour allows students to access the campus quickly and easily using a URL 

through any major browser. Potential cadets have the ability to tour the campus on 

their own, or can attend individual or group tours with an automated admissions 

representative who is able to showcase all of the Academy's features. Non-playing 

characters provide additional information on what the Academy has to offer. Interactive 

games such as basketball, hockey, parachute and a flight simulator offer a fun and 

engaging medium to keep cadets coming back to learn more. Points from trivia and 

games allow for the purchase of USAFA branded virtual apparel and accessories, 

including the top prize - the mascot uniform. Then cadets are able to access the 

application quickly and easily through the virtual campus tour once they have decided 

USAFA is the right place for them. The development of the 3D virtual campus tour MMO 

for the USAFA has proven to be a valued addition to the recruitment process with over 

1,000 potential cadets in the system within the first few months. Additional information 

on this entry can be found at http://www.designingdigitaHv.com/portfolio/virtualworlds/united-states-air-force-academv-browserbased-3d-virtual-campus-tour.

The 'Holodeck - Making It So' Focus Area - This focus area was a call to developers to 

make significant advancements toward reducing the gap between the player and the 

environment using low cost materials. Entries were limited to $600 hardware costs 

(aside from the computing platform) each. 

Grand Prize and First Place Winner: CyberSim Holodeck - This entry uses two scenarios 

to demonstrate the potential capabilities of various virtual world input devices: 

microphone, keyboard, Xbox Kinect, and the Emotiv brain computer interface head set. 

Each of the devices was made compatible with SecondLife and OpenSim and was an

Augmented Virtual Reality tool that brought real world experiences into Virtual Worlds. 

The CyberSim Holodeck models a Security Operations Center (SOC) as an augmented 

virtual cyber security analyst workspace. The CyberSim Holodeck combines virtual 

reality (SecondLife and Military Open Simulator Enterprise Strategy (MOSES)) with 

augmented reality technologies (Smartphone and HTML5 viewer) to create an analytic 

training environment for the next generation cyber security analyst using low-cost nontraditional input devices. Examples of input devices include a microphone for Voice 

Recognition/Command using PocketPhinx software; a standard keyboard for Text to 

Speech using cepstral and flite software; an Xbox Kinect for skeletal tracking using 

OpenNI and FAAST software, and an Emotiv head set for EGG using Expressive, 

Affective, Cognitive Suites. Augmented Reality capabilities were demonstrated, using 

smartphone applications, further reducing the gap between the player and environment 

to bring real experiences into the Holodeck virtual environment. Additional information 

on this entry can be found at http://www.cvbersim.net/Holodeck/Holodeck.php
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10.2 Air Force Challenges: Fuel Scrubber, Grey DATA, Durable Dielectrics on 

Polycarbonate, and Energetic Core-Shell Nanocluster Production

In FY 2012, the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) executed four award challenges to 

address near-term problems facing the Warfighter. By opening these challenges up to 

the world through InnoCentive, AFRL was able to increase the number of people 

addressing this problem by over 100 fold and received workable solutions within a very 

short amount of time. 

The primary goal of the Air Force (AF) challenge program is to apply emerging and 

existing technologies in novel ways to solve near-term problems facing the Warfighter. 

One of the challenges in meeting these urgent needs is the long timeline associated with 

establishing a program to execute such a solution, which is largely a result of established 

business and acquisition processes for funding allocation, market surveys, contracting, 

program management, and review that are tuned for longer term research activities. 

Each challenge was assigned a Challenge Owner from a technical directorate that had 

responsibility in the area of interest. If a challenge produced a usable result, the award 

was paid and the Challenge Owner would incorporate the result in their technology 

development program. The four challenges and results are as follows:

10.2.1 Fuel Recovery: This theoretical challenge was to create a system that could 

enable recovery of Air Force Jet engine fuel spilled from a storage silo. The system must 

remove synthetic surfactants that are commonly used in firefighting foams as well as 

water and other debris. The solution needs to be portable as part of an overall fuel 

recovery solution that would be able to recover up to 200,000 gallons in an 8 hour 

period allowing the fuel to be immediately ready for use in operational aircraft. There 

were 447 people that responded to this challenge and showed interest in providing 

solutions. Of the 17 concepts that were submitted, three solutions had merit and were 

worth pursuing. Two of these ideas solved one of the requirements for Joint Capability 

Technology Demonstration (JCTD) program. The JCTD program manager decided to 

make a dual award and pursue two of these ideas to reduce the technology risk to his 

program. The JCTD program manager is now developing working prototypes for both 

concepts to find out which one will work better in the field environments. Prior to the 

challenge, the program manager had no viable ideas on how to solve this problem. 

10.2.2 Grey Data: AF researchers routinely process large amounts of information from 

diverse sources (e.g., sensors, social media, public records). Data on people's activities 

and habits are increasingly available online, raising the possibility of a researcher 

inadvertently violating privacy act laws. This ideation challenge was to find a 

trustworthy automated mechanism to determine whether online information is public 

or private. There were 684 people that responded to this challenge, and the ideas that 

were submitted identified many partial solutions that could be combined to create a 

robust automated discovery mechanism. It also identified new data mining software 

that the researchers were not aware of (e.g., "Splunk") that could be trained to alert on 
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private data. The results of this challenge were added to a legal studies report produced 

by the USAF Academy on how to determine boundaries of social media research. 

10.2.3 Durable Dielectrics on Polycarbonate: AF researchers were looking for a 

dielectric coating and a process to apply it to a curved polycarbonate substrate whose 

surface area ranges from 150 to 750 square cm. The coating had to act as a "hot mirror" 

(transmit visible, reflect near infra-red), be up to 10 microns in thickness, and maintain 

its integrity and performance under environmental conditions (-40 C to +70 C, and 0% to 

98% RH, Mil Std Salt fog testing). Although 237 people participated in this challenge, 

there was no viable solution found and no award was made. 

10.2.4 Energetic Core-Shell Nanocluster Production: AF researchers were looking for 

material processing technologies for the production of core-shell nanoclusters of 

energetic materials with particle diameters between 5 and 25 nm. Emphasis was on a 

controllable process that produced air-stable, consistent particles at increased rates that 

could scale up to at least lg/hour. This challenge had 202 participants but the challenge 

was also sent to over 100 different nano-research centers across the United States with 

information about this challenge and AFRL's interest in following up with a Small 

Business Research effort to test out a potential solution. This challenge is still under 

evaluation from those responses submitted to the Challenge. AFRL was also contacted 

by one credible source that did not want to submit to the prize but indicated that they 

would be submitting to the SBIR solicitation in order to retain control of their

Intellectual Property and noted that they would not have responded to the SBIR 

announcement without first being alerted to it by the challenge.

10.3 DARPA Challenges: Cash for Locating and Identifying Quick Response

In FY 2012, DARPA executed two challenge award programs: (1) the Cash for Locating 

and Identifying Quick Response (CLIQR) Codes Quest Challenge, and (2) the Shredder 

Challenge.

10.3.1 CLIQR Codes Quest: The CLIQR Challenge sought to advance the understanding 

of social media and the Internet to explore the role each plays in timely communication, 

wide-area team building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, timecritical problems. The DARPA CLIQR Quest Challenge provided an increased 

understanding of how social networks organize around a common theme. The 

hypothesis was that information brokers would emerge in the development of a 

network and could be identified through nodal analysis of activity. The Challenge 

demonstrated that social networks formed as hypothesized, enabling DARPA to map 

and analyze the process through a semi-controlled scenario. Subsequent to the event, 

DARPA discussed the results, methods employed, and potential ramifications with 

several organizations including PeopleBrowsr, HHS ASPR, and the Department of 

Homeland Security Office of Resilience Policy. In addition, all four Services received 
95

information regarding and had exposure to this Challenge. The DARPA CLIQR Quest 

Challenge achieved its goals and has helped DARPA advance the understanding of social 

media and the Internet and explored the role the Internet and social networking play in 

the timely communication, wide area team-building, and urgent mobilization required 

to solve broad scope, time-critical problems.

10.3.2 Shredder Challenge: The DARPA Shredder Challenge called upon participants to 

piece together a series of shredded documents using any means available, including 

manual methods, computerized methods, and crowd sourcing. Five one-sided 

handwritten documents were shredded into more than 10,000 pieces, and the images 

of the shredded pieces were posted online. Document subject matter and the degree of 

shredding were varied to present problems of increasing difficulty. To complete each 

problem, participants provided answers to questions embedded in the content of 

reconstructed documents, with the intent of mirroring the problem facing an 

intelligence analyst with a similar task. Competitors were awarded points according to 

an established rubric for successfully reconstructing documents and to a sufficient 

degree that they could answer embedded questions. The goal of the DARPA Shredder 

Challenge was to accelerate technological solutions and problem-solving techniques 

enabling the reconstruction of shredded documents at the tactical edge. Specifically, the 

program goals were to: (1) identify and assess potential capabilities that could be used 

by warfighters to more quickly obtain valuable information from confiscated, shredded 

documents, and (2) gain a quantitative understanding of potential vulnerabilities 

inherent to the shredding of sensitive U.S. National Security documents. 

The DARPA Shredder Challenge was a successful demonstration of the potential of an 

integrated human-machine approach to solve large, complex problems that would be 

near impossible by any other means. DARPA discussed the results with several 

organizations within the law enforcement, military, and intelligence communities 

including the Federal Bureau of Investigation Questioned Documents Unit, Army G2 

Document and Media Exploitation, and Sandia National Laboratories. The DARPA 

Shredder Challenge achieved its goals and stimulated interest in the programs and 

projects of interest to the DOD science and technology community. The event attracted 

a large pool of nontraditional participants. The varied methods used have potential 

implications for problems generally considered unsolvable by conventional means. This 

result promises to inspire a new class of problem solving approaches in areas important 

to National Security.