Innovation-challenges

The Mozilla Foundation is increasingly relying upon Open Innovation Challenges to drive much of its programming and activity. A fair amount of descriptive copy - from presentations to 1-pagers to full-out proposals - has been written about our approach to the model. This purpose of this page is to collect the various descriptions for re-purposing in other communication materials.

One-Pager

Tackling the Unknown

Open Innovation Challenges gather the best and brightest to identify promising ideas and move them from concept to prototype to implementation. The model draws upon themes and methodologies similar to design-based research, especially in translating theories of complex systems to practical problems within a given, specified, challenging, and collaborative learning environment. Challenges are a formal framework designed and used by Mozilla to tackle problem sets whose solution is unknown. While subject to variation, the basic structure consists of four phases:

Qualification. Participants are chosen from among the community of practitioners based upon the degree to which their work has the potential to produce tangible impact – defined as measurable progress towards the organizing challenge statements – and to ensure a diversity of background and opinion.

Peer-based learning and exchange. The participants are brought together to share their ideas within a structured workshop. The format is designed to purposefully do away with conference norms such as PowerPoint presentations and a division between speaker and audience. Participants are guided to keep an open mind and a focus on ideas that can be implemented easily and immediately, with the goal of establishing short-term feedback loops.

Iterative development and application. Immediately following (and often during) the workshop, participants are asked to form self-selected groups and begin work on new tools, systems, models, and other projects that tackle the challenge statements. Resources are committed to projects that begin to show promise. Projects are awarded increasingly larger degrees of support through iterative funding rounds. Continued support is contingent upon results. Projects that stall or do not produce the desired outcomes are removed from the innovation framework. Participants assigned to those projects are encouraged to join forces with those initiatives still underway.

Narrowing and launch. Project iteration and funding rounds continue until there are a handful of projects with demonstrable results and progress towards the challenge statements. These projects are formalized as initiatives of the partner organizations and work begins to scale the projects’ impact across the target sector.

The Open Innovation Challenge model is the central tool Mozilla uses to innovate new technology. Challenges have informed user interface designs for Firefox Sync; created data visualizations for bug tracking and testing; and laid the groundwork for integrating contact management into Firefox. Additionally, Mozilla is using an Open Innovation Challenge in partnership with the Knight Foundation to drive the development of new technology to shape the future of digital journalism. Open Innovation Challenges capture the benefits of open-ended conversation – the generativity that comes from the freedom to propose radical ideas, many points of view, diverse perspectives, crowdsourced insight, and accidental encounter – while driving to tangible progress by applying a strict definition of success: the elimination and surmounting of clearly defined challenge statements.

Language on Specific Aspects

Participation & Engagement

• Geeks alone cannot keep the web open for the long haul. We also need teachers, artists, lawyers, journalists and everyone else who works and plays online to get involved. This is why we’ve started Mozilla Drumbeat: a nascent effort to engage ‘the people formerly known as users’ in the process of innovating and shaping the future of the web.

• At the same time, it is not journalists alone who will reinvent journalism. There is also a need to engage radical and entrepreneurial technologists who want to build new tools and techniques around the core civic values of journalism. The ideas that will reinvigorate news will, at least in part, flow from the technology and culture of the open web.

• We are not just searching for promising "programmer-journalists" and "media hackers," we are looking to promote and grow the field beyond the choir. We are looking for the "outliers" – those web programmers, mobile application developers, user interface designers, artists, and thinkers – that will bring completely new and innovative thinking to the news industry. We are also looking for those journalists who are trying to push the boundaries of the medium and are experimenting with new ideas through technology.

Structure & Flow

• The process is designed to cast a very wide net for participants at the beginning and then slowly narrow down the field to a very small group of dynamic and talented individuals that are offered a fellowship. At each step that we are proposing – a design challenge, an online course, a face-to-face prototype-building event – participants would be competing by demonstrating their ability to bring innovative thinking and practical development skills to the challenges of tomorrow's news ecosystem, and the open web.