NASA Launches Open Innovation Challenge to Improve the International Space Station

Today NASA launched a new open innovation challenge to find a solution to maximize the amount of solar energy the International Space Station can harvest. This is the latest in a string of crowdsourcing projects from NASA. The project is being facilitated by TopCoder's open innovation community with a total prize pool of $30,000. The challenge is open to anyone.

One of the key NASA employees responsible for this particular challenge is Jason Crusan, who will also be speaking at Crowdopolis Big Apple, Feb 27-28 in New York. This ISS challenge was one of the very first ideas NASA had when they looked at TopCoder. After figuring out how to properly isolate the algorithm so it could be presented to a global community and net some really positive gains, NASA is now able to launch the challenge.

NASA is one of the pioneers in this field, consistently leveraging Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing to help their teams solve big, and rather specific challenges. This very complex algorithm challenge is being launched via the NASA Tournament Lab (NTL), an Open Innovation platform powered by TopCoder and in partnership with Harvard Business School.

On TopCoder's blog announcement you can view an interview between Clinton Bonner (TopCoder) and William Spetch, a NASA aerospace engineer from their VIPER team – Vehicle Integrated Performance, Environments and Resources – who is heading up this brand new open innovation challenge focused on energy harvesting aboard the International Space Station (ISS). 

We encourage all readers to join or pass along this exciting challenge. If you'd like to join NASA and help them solve a challenge with their International Space Station, visit TopCoder.com/iss right now to learn more and get started.

Let's help NASA power the International Space Station so they can continue to boldly go and so we can truly say; "I'm giving it all she's got Captain!"