Federal Crowdsourcing Webinar Series, Episode 8: How NASA@WORK Ignites Ideas from Within

Have you ever been laser-focused on a problem for some time, only to have the solution suddenly come from an unlikely source? The best ideas can come from within our own organizations, perhaps an office or two away – the hardest part is knowing when and how to open the topic to a larger group for ideas.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) thrives on tapping its internal braintrust to bring inspiring and innovative ideas forward. Through its internal crowdsourcing platform, NASA@WORK, the space agency encourages its staff to post problems in the form of challenges in which the entire NASA community can participate.

Managed by NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI), NASA@WORK specialists work closely with program teams to prepare challenges, accept ideas, and evaluate solutions in as little as 10 weeks. Winning ideas and their authors are recognized widely across the agency.

This webinar shows you how to:

• Generate new ideas with idea competitions (or ideations) internal to your organizations.
• Add structure and definition to a challenge or problem before sourcing for ideas.
• Encourage and reward participation.

More About the Federal Crowdsourcing Webinar Series

Airing the second Tuesday of each month, this series illuminates how U.S. agencies are reaching beyond their typical channels to source talent and enthusiasm to multiply the ideas and perspectives being brought to a particular issue. Don’t miss these previous episodes:

• Episode 7: Crowdsourcing for Code, with Amin Mehr, Code.gov
• Episode 6: FedRAMP Ideation, with Betsy Steele, GSA
• Episode 5: History by the People, with Lauren Algee, Library of Congress
• Episode 4: Open Opportunities, with Lisa Nelson, USAJOBS, OPM
• Episode 3: The Opportunity Project, with Drew Zachary and Lorena Molina-Irizarry, U.S. Census Bureau
• Episode 2: Challenges and Prize Competitions, with Jarah Meador, GSA, and Jessie Buerlein, HHS
• Episode 1: Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science, with John McLaughlin, NOAA, and Sophia B. Liu, USGS

Presenters

Carissa Callini leads the NASA@WORK program at NASA CoECI. In addition to encouraging the use of open innovation at NASA and cultivating the proliferation of the NASA@WORK community, she develops and executes NASA challenges as a CoECI challenge coordinator. In this role, she supports technical teams from NASA and other federal agencies to run crowdsourcing challenges external to their organizations. Carissa is a contractor with KBR Inc., where she serves as an innovation leader with responsibilities promoting and implementing new innovation and problem-solving techniques. Prior to joining KBR, Carissa spent several years in the chemical industry working in research and development, product development and new business development.

Jeffrey Doi is a data and business integration specialist for NASA CoECI who is responsible for CoECI challenge information and data integration, proposal evaluation, challenge coordination, and NASA@WORK support. He has supported several NASA programs, including the Human Research Program and NASA IT Labs, and served as the international science coordinator for the Multilateral Human Research Panel for Exploration that was chartered by the five International Space Station partners. He is a senior engineer with MEI Technologies who has served as a project lead/project engineer on several flight hardware projects in the engineering directorate at NASA’s Johnson Space Center including hardware from the Intravehicular Activity Flight Crew Equipment (IVA FCE) and Crew Health Care Systems (CHeCS) catalogs.

This talk is hosted by Challenge.gov. Managed by GSA, Challenge.gov serves as both the official listing of prize competitions across government, as well as a centralized platform for federal agencies to market their problem-solving events. The program also designs resources and training, which have helped more than 102 federal agencies run over 1,100 prize competitions with public participation since 2010.