Celebrating the past and envisioning the future of the NASA Tournament Lab.

This week, the NASA Tournament Lab is commemorating its 10-year anniversary with a special workshop. Open innovation leaders from NASA and other agencies are sharing how NASA and the federal government have used crowdsourcing to solve important problems, and in the process, created a powerful new — and open — way to achieve ambitious goals.

Luminary Labs first joined the NASA Tournament Lab in 2015, and we were awarded a second open innovation services contract in 2020. Our work with NASA includes designing and producing multistage open innovation challenges — such as MagQuest, the Opioid Detection Challenge, Ready for Rescue, and the Hidden Signals Challenge — to identify and advance solutions on behalf of federal agencies. At this week’s event, Luminary Labs President Janna Gilbert joins a private-sector “Crowdsourcing Companions” panel to share insights from MagQuest, a $2.1 million competition we designed and produced on behalf of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA).

NASA’s open innovation story is just beginning, and we’re honored to continue our relationship with the Tournament Lab. We are beginning work on the LymeX Diagnostics Prize and a prize competition for the National Institutes of Health’s SPARC (Stimulating Peripheral Activity to Relieve Conditions) initiative, and we’re hiring for newly created open innovation roles (including directors, engagement managers, and senior associates) to support an expanding slate of clients and projects. Learn more about our focus areas and join us as we help clients place big bets and launch groundbreaking initiatives.

To help the NASA Tournament Lab celebrate the past and envision the future, we’ve compiled a list of Luminary Labs resources for future-ready leaders in government agencies, nonprofit foundations, and private-sector companies.

• 5 ideas for making public prizes even more powerful (2021): Our nation’s recovery is contingent upon collaboration; the United States can embrace open innovation as a mechanism for tackling challenges together.
• Using open innovation to address a crisis (2021): What leaders can learn from more than 300 initiatives launched in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
• How open innovation can help solve 21st-century public health problems (2021): Luminary Labs’ Sara Holoubek, Brown University’s Dr. Megan Ranney, and Schimdt Futures’ Kumar Garg issue a call for cross-sector collaboration.
• Luminary Labs awarded NASA open innovation services contract (2020): Luminary Labs was awarded a five-year contract with the NASA Tournament Lab for the second time. To celebrate, we shared an overview of the first five years of our NTL engagements.
• Looking back at the year in open innovation (2020): In the midst of a global pandemic, we designed and produced nine health, education, science, and technology initiatives.
• Open innovation reading list (2019): 10 articles, chapters, and research papers that have informed our approach.
• The State of Open Innovation (2018): Luminary Labs’ inaugural survey of nearly 100 private sector, government, and nonprofit organizations. (Read the executive summary.)
• Measuring open innovation outcomes (2018): Highlights from our survey of 60 prize recipients across 14 large-scale, multistage challenges we ran on behalf of government, nonprofit, and private sector clients.
• The most important prize incentive isn’t what you think (2018): Our survey of prize recipients confirmed that cash awards are major motivators that attract solvers. But some innovators need — and value — more than money to move from concept to viability.

Find out about more competitions, accelerators, events, and other opportunities from Luminary Labs and our extended network: Sign up to receive open innovation alerts. 

Photo credit: NASA