“We love crowdfunding and we love incentive competitions. What’s working is that there isn’t a singular platform to go to to combine and collaborate on these types of projects and we’re creating it! There are definitely great platforms that tend to work within certain problem verticals, but our goal is to become the one-stop-shop for solving problems and creating innovation in the world. So far, we have over $2M in prizes, 4 live competitions, and over 50 challenge concepts posted.
Crowdfunding is great and we are seeing it applied in lots of different ways. Our prediction is that crowdfunding will become as ubiquitous as the e-commerce shopping cart. Instead of going to one site to use it, it will be a part of all online platforms, with interpretations, functionality and usage that is relevant to that particular case.
Rahim Kanani sat down with our co-founder Emily Fowler to discuss the launch of HeroX, what inspired it, and how it could help shape the 21st Century and beyond. Emily has dedicated her passion into creating a world of creativity and innovation. Before she launched HeroX, she was the Director of Prize Development at XPRIZE where she designed incentive competitions and pioneered an open innovation approach to sourcing ideas called Visioneering.
Our prediction is that crowdfunding will become as ubiquitous as the e-commerce shopping cart. Instead of going to one site to use it, it will be a part of all online platforms, with interpretations, functionality and usage that is relevant to that particular case.
Incentive competitions work best when they are objective, measurable, and structured. Competitions that haven’t worked in the past have tended to be open-ended and generally loose in terms of the metrics they’re measuring. The power of competitions comes from the ability to break a large, difficult, typically amorphous problem, into one key “question” that people can’t wait to solve. For instance, the problem of poverty can seem daunting. But, if the problem is broken down into “Decrease the poverty rate by 10% over 18 months in the city of XYZ and capture your method for doing so,” it immediately triggers the brain to think in a new and creative way.
Once just an idea of creating a “craigslist for competitions”, get the full scoop on how this idea transformed into HeroX. [ Inside the Launch of HeroX ]
