Energy Harvesting on the ISS: NASA’s Newest Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing Challenge

“Space… the final frontier.” For many sci-fi fans – myself included in the geek-dom –  that iconic opening line from Star Trek speaks to the vast openness of both the physicality of space and the opportunities that lay ahead for us humans. As we continue to explore and experiment in space, a newer technique for innovating continues to emerge and evolve here on Earth. Open Innovation challenges focused on solving or improving rather complex mathematical solutions is finding great and repeated success in this format utilizing a community of competitors. Each new Open Innovation challenge represents one small step for man, and one giant leap for innovation kind.

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.

I very recently had the pleasure to interview William Spetch, a NASA aerospace engineer from their VIPER team – Vehicle Integrated Performance, Environments and Resources – who is heading up a brand new open innovation challenge focused on energy harvesting aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Watch the video below to understand the importance of this Open Innovation challenge, not just for the space station and NASA, but potentially for all of humanity as well. 

We encourage all readers to join or pass along this exciting challenge and here’s an easy way to do so. Below is a short animated video that sums up this exciting algorithmic competition. Please watch and share the contest and if you’d care to register visit www.TopCoder.com/iss right now.

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!”

Read the official press release for this exciting competition right here. 

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