Challenges for Creative Minds

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Entries, due by Oct. 15, should employ digital media (ideally within an open-source framework), deliver news or information on a shared basis, and involve a geographically defined community. In other words, this is about collaborative journalism and information.

In 2006, its inaugural year, the jury awarded prizes to 25 individuals and organizations for projects such as community databases and immigrant newscasts. Although all the first-year winners were Americans, the News Challenge is open to innovators from any country and of any background.

Bottom Line: Executable Ideas

This is actually a common trait of the three challenges: You don't need to be a scientist to participate in the Buckminster Fuller Challenge, nor a journalist to compete for the Knight money. Ideas are what matters. Executable ideas, that is. This is no time for blue-sky dreaming. All three challenges seek realistic, achievable ideas and designs and explicitly intend the prize money to be used to bring the winning concept to the next stage of development or to market.

Innovation competitions and awards are nothing new, but they are a growing trend. Many have been inspired, no doubt, by the success of the Ansari X-Prize, which saw teams compete for the first private manned craft to reach space twice in two weeks. (The $10 million prize went to Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne team in 2004). The X-Prize itself has now been expanded to push scientific and technological advances in other fields, and similar challenges have been issued by a variety of organizations, from the Defense Dept.'s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (for the development of autonomous robotic vehicles) to the three outlined above.

But the success of the X-Prize isn't the only thing driving the trend. At its core, it reflects a change in how innovation happens. Long-term corporate research and development is declining, structured and slow traditional approaches are weakening, and at the same time we are witnessing the Internet-fuelled rise of open, nimble —and fast—innovation methods. In this perspective, challenges could become a future organizing principle for open innovation.

Bruno Giussani is a Swiss writer, tech entrepreneur, conference host and the author of "Roam: Making Sense of the Wireless Internet." He blogs at http://www.LunchOverIP.com. For BusinessWeek.com Giussani writes the monthly EuroScan column, discussing innovation in Europe.