Federal Government Looks to the Crowd for Next Generation Technologies

Are we on the threshold of a new federal acquisitions process? Instead of the traditional Request for Proposal (RFP) process, federal agencies have been turning slowly to crowdsourcing as a model to address some of the most pressing problems for both federal agencies and the nation. Through crowdsourcing, a collaborative method of design, government entities like the Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and NASA hope to create a more innovative, streamlined design-to-production process at a fraction of the cost. Additional agencies have reached out to the crowd through Challenge.gov — a prize platform that cultivates social problem solving through competitions and prizes.

Earlier this month, DARPA announced a new $1 million challenge to the crowd to design an amphibious armored vehicle for the transport of Marines. The Fast, Adaptable Next-Generation (FANG) challenge will test if crowdsourcing can be an effective means of designing military vehicles and weaponry. It is the latest in a $300 million series of challenges and prize contest that would use crowdsourcing not only to design military equipment, but also to expedite the modeling and ultimately manufacturing of those technologies.

Although crowdsourcing is a highly successful model for the collaborative design of a product, mostly used in the software industry, DARPA officials believe that it can be used effectively in all phases of the design-to-production processes including manufacturing. If successful, the process could cut the military's acquisitions process to less than four years, while introducing greater design flexibility and dramatically reduce design-to-production costs. Even in the face of severe defense cuts, DARPA intends to announce more of these non-traditional crowdsourced projects in the coming years.

NASA, a victim of severe budget cuts, recently launched the ISS Longeron Shadowing Optimization Challenge — a $30,000 competition that challenges the crowd to develop software algorithms that make solar panels on the International Space Station (ISS) more energy efficient. The winning algorithms will help add power to the space station and expand the number and types of science experiments that can be performed onboard. This is one of numerous NASA prize competitions to provide low-cost answers to pressing agency issues without using the traditional RFP process. Many of them have been hosted on the Challenge.gov portal.

Launched on September 7, 2010, Challenge.gov is an effort by the Obama administration to solve the nation's most pressing problems via crowdsourcing without a formal government RFP. The web-based competition platform has hosted over 200 challenges posted by 45 federal departments and agencies. According to a White House press release from September 2012, more than 16,000 Americans have participated in competitions and competed for prizes on challenge.gov, with additional entrants joining the competitions through other sources. Many of these challenges provide small pots of money to support the research, design and development of innovative technologies across a spectrum of research areas such as green energy, healthcare, software development, web-based/mobile applications and military technologies. Active challenges include:

• Non-invasive Measurement of Intra-cranial Pressure Challenge — a $15,000 competition to develop a non-invasive method or technology to measure the absolute intracranial pressure; and,
• The Apps for Vehicles Challenge — the Department of Energy competition challenges programmers to develop a mobile or web-based application that improve safety and fuel efficiency through the use of open data sources.