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Client Success Stories

AB InBev Bottle Opener Challenge:

Creating new designs to close glass bottles

In October 2018 This challenge was sponsored by

The Challenge

Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV (AB InBev) is the world’s largest brewer. With over 500 brands, they are considered one of the largest fast-moving consumer goods in the world. The company makes and sells millions of glass bottles of beer every week, and they were interested in new design options for glass bottle closures. Pry-off and twist-off bottle caps have been around for over a hundred years, and they continue to dominate markets due to their simple design and low cost. However, these designs have some drawbacks. The pry-off version requires the use of a tool to lever off the cap, and the twist-off version can be difficult to twist and/or cut the hand of the person opening the bottle.  The Bottle Opener Challenge sought to identify ideas and designs for new, user-friendly bottle closures.
 

The Work

As part of a larger effort to explore different on-demand work options, AB InBev decided to use the HeroX platform to run the AB InBev Bottle Opener Challenge. Typically, the two biggest challenges in crowdsourcing projects are designing the challenge and making the crowd aware of its existence. HeroX’s numerous tools, templates, and available guides made it easy for AB InBev to build the challenge themselves, and they put together a great example of a single-phase challenge. It clearly described the problem, explained what was wrong with current solutions, provided the guidelines for what a successful solution would look like, and stated both the timeline and the prize. 

Raising awareness of a challenge is critical to its success since it’s hard for people to share their great ideas if they don’t know that an opportunity exists.  Fortunately, AB InBev is a major, global company with numerous established brands and excellent marketing and communications resources.  Between their brand recognition and the HeroX platform community, their crowd was easier to build than it might have been for other challenges.

The Outcome

AB InBev was impressed by both the global reach of their challenge and the overall creativity of the submitted designs.  They received over 70 submissions from roughly two dozen countries.  The breadth of the respondents’ backgrounds was surprising, as was the depth of knowledge that some submissions demonstrated. Although AB InBev does not plan to pursue the winning design due to misalignment with their current business strategies, the company still considers its first experience with crowdsourcing as a positive and valuable one. The AB InBev Bottle Opener Challenge is a great example of how a company can successfully use the HeroX platform to host a basic challenge with only minimal support from HeroX.

Grand Prize Winner:

Design
2 months
$5K USD
71
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