When creating a crowdsourcing challenge on HeroX, one of the first areas potential innovators will read is your Overview section. This Overview section gives the reader high-level information about what you are looking to achieve with your challenge, as well as a little background on yourself or your organization. While a challenge focused on a hot topic will certainly intrigue people to sign up, a strongly written Overview section can inspire others to solve your problem regardless of the subject area.
Here are some of the big tips you should consider while writing this section:
Stay in the Problem Space
Common Mistakes
“If someone comes to you with a problem, you start thinking of a solution. That’s natural — everyone does it. But as soon as you start thinking of a solution, you unconsciously begin shutting off possibilities for getting a deeper understanding of the problem and therefore of finding a truly breakthrough solution.” Read more, by Harvard here.
Tips
Stay in the problem space and try to avoid presupposing what solutions to your challenge may be. More from Harvard, “Go deep. Look for underlying issues. What’s the real obstacle you face? Once you’ve found it, go deeper still. What’s the essence of that obstacle? Then search for different viewpoints on the obstacle. Go far afield. Look for people who have faced that same essential challenge, and tap their insights.” To get help on finding the root cause, read this article about the 5 Why’s.
Understand the Status Quo
Common Mistakes
Sometimes Challenge Creators have not conducted research on what already exists in the market.
Tips
Find out what already exists in the market as a competitor. Clearly understand the status quo, and provide Innovators with this research. Then, tell Innovators why that solution is still inadequate: is it inefficient, non-existent, ineffective?
Clearly Define the Rules
Common Mistakes
Challenges that fail are most often challenges that were not clear enough in communicating to solvers exactly what is required to win.
Tips
Your challenge must be measurable and clear, objective. Make sure you explicitly understand and describe what must be done to win. In the original XPRIZE, the Ansari XPRIZE, the winning team had to “build and fly a privately funded spaceship capable of carrying 3 adults to 100 km altitude, land safely, and make that flight again within two weeks.” Note: the challenge rules did not say “the winning team must build and fly a spaceship to new heights, safely, and able to prove repeatability.” The challenge designers defined what each metric meant in numbers.
Find the right “First Domino”
Common Mistakes
Some challenges try to “boil the ocean.” In other words, they are unsolvable. You want to find the perfect balance between audacious and achievable so that the challenge can be won.
Tips
In the original XPRIZE, the Ansari XPRIZE, the winning team had to “build and fly a privately funded spaceship capable of carrying 3 adults to 100 km altitude, land safely, and make that flight again within two weeks.” Note: Although commercial space travel may be the ultimate goal, the Winning Team statement was not “the winning team had to build and fly a privately funded spaceship capable of carrying 3 adults to Mars.” That Winning Team statement may be the 15th domino, but if you properly incentivize the first domino, the others will follow.
Find a Deeper Purpose
Common Mistakes
Beware of launching challenges that appear self-serving, only aimed at helping you make more money.
Tips
Dig into the purpose of your Organization. Is there a bigger cause for the environment, your employees, your customers, or the world at large that will be impacted as a result of this challenge? Convey that story in the Overview.
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To read the full guide, visit our Knowledge Base article here. Or, if you're ready to start drafting your challenge, you can begin here.
