Contests, in many ways, can drive ideation.
The X Prize Foundation achieves this through grand global challenges. Los Angeles-based company Skild is creating competitions for everyone -- from universities to community organizations to major corporations, such as General Electric and AT&T. And now they're in partnership with the National Science Foundation.
Founded in 2002, Skild is a platform and software for running competitions. Its more specific aim is to help brands, businesses, and nonprofits design competitions that drive innovation. They design and manage every aspect of online contests -- offering software, strategic contest design, account management, marketing, legal help, and contest rules development.
In essence, they’re a support system for innovation. With the greater idea in mind: To get organizations to unlock the untapped potential within their own people.
The idea for a competition-based business first came to founder and CEO Anil Rathi, when he was still a student. While in graduate school, he was part of a club called THINC (Thunderbird Innovators‘ Circle) that held brainstorming sessions for brands with students from around the world.
“Initially, it was an incidental experiment. We took this idea and expanded it by inviting students from the top 100 business schools in the world to tackle real-world corporate challenges. The first year we had participants from 15 countries including India, Spain, Japan, China, and France,” said Rathi.
The name of the company “Skild” came from the idea that everyone has skills to share, and everyone is skilled in some way.
Rathi’s initial inkling has developed into a enterprise that now has over ten years of experience in spurring national ideation. To date, Skild has helped run and design over 120 competitions for various companies and organizations, including: IBM, Viacom, Nissan, TBWA/Chiat Day, Royal Bank of Canada, the University of Southern California, among many others.
One example in particular that crystalizes their work: In partnership with Tufts University and endorsed by First Lady Michelle Obama, Skild crafted a competition to identify and reward the most creative and scalable school-based programs to fight childhood obesity.
The result was a competition winner in Corona-Norco Unified School District’s “100 Mile Club” -- based on the goal of running or walking 100 miles at school during a single school year. Their model is now used in more than 115 schools, reaching more than 30,000 students.
This is also part of the Skild mission: To get innovation and ideas to spread.
Currently working with the National Science Foundation, Skild will be setting up competitions to drive innovation in several areas of science, such as: teaching science to kids and igniting their scientific creativity, communicating science journalism and creating public understanding between scientists and citizens, and approaching agricultural challenges in the developing world.
“These competitions open the door to new, fresh ideas – particularly from a younger generation with personal energy and out-of-the-box ideas. The online competitions bring in new audiences as contributors to solutions,” said the National Science Foundation’s Susan Mason.
Skild hopes the partnership gets a national audience inspired about science and science-related fields.
In terms of what all of these competitions can do for American innovation as a whole, Rathi underscored the importance of open innovation and a democratized approach to creating our collective future.
He said, “There’s one great natural resource left in the world: ideas. I believe these competitions will help America mine these ideas and show anyone that they can be an innovator. It’s about empowering people.”
“My greatest hope is that well designed competitions will create a level playing field to find these ideas and innovators, drive innovation, and inspire others to take action.”
