Guide: Your Judging Panel

Goals for Judges’ Engagement:

• Selection of Finalists/Winners: engagement of 5-7 judges to help select the top submission(s) for the prize or prizes
• Organizational engagement: opportunity to further engage judges in your organization as potential advisors, investors, or for new or continued collaboration.

Value for Challenge Sponsor

• Judges bestow credibility to the challenge.
• Judges provide high level expertise in the challenge subject area.
• Judges can inspire potential competitors to submit.

Value for the Judge

• Recognition as an expert in their field.
• Exposure and relationship-building opportunities with the challenge sponsor and other partners.
• New experiences and being at the cutting edge of innovation

Suggested Profiles of Judges:

The judges selected to participate on the judges’ panel represent one of the most important aspects of a crowdsourcing competition. Here are 3 areas to consider when recruiting your judges:

• Topic Relevance - Judges should have experience and expertise in the challenge subject area. They should be well-versed in the issue both from a theoretical and pragmatic angle and be able to speak to overarching issues and the area’s application globally.
• Diversity - The judges’ panel should be representative of the global innovation community and of the many people and organizations who would have a stake in the competition. All efforts should be made to consider the panel as a whole and ensure it represents a diverse range of characteristics (e.g. gender, nationality, age, sector of work, etc.)
• Innovation - The best evaluators of innovation are themselves innovators; therefore, judges should be not only familiar with and committed to the topic, but also leaders/innovators in their own work and sector.