A lot of very smart people work at NASA. Many of them are literally rocket scientists. And yet, despite employing some of the top brains in America, NASA regularly asks civilians for help with its most complicated problems. Part of the reason for this is financial. NASA has a $19 billion dollar budget, but it gets eaten up quickly by long-term projects like, say, sending humans to Mars. Limited resources means that the space agency has to budget intelligently. When NASA needs solutions at a discount, they call NineSigma, a company that crowdsources innovation initiatives.
“You can’t employ every technical mind on the planet,” Kevin Andrews, senior program manager with NineSigma, points out.
Andrews recently managed NASA’s in-situ materials challenge, a call for new extraterrestrial infrastructure proposals involving space rocks and dust. The nature of the problem is highly technical, and yet somehow also very well suited to the innovation-by-public-competition model.
To read more, click here.