Introduction

On Friday, April 30, 2010, over 200 individuals representing more than 35 government agencies and 35 private sector and nonprofit organizations gathered in Washington, DC for a landmark daylong strategy session jointly convened by the Case Foundation, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the White House Domestic Policy Council. The conference, Promoting Innovation: Prizes, Challenges and Open Grantmaking, brought the private and public sectors together to discuss lessons and strategies learned from experiments in prizes, challenges and open grantmaking.

This gathering was an extension of the Case Foundation’s continued efforts to encourage citizen involvement in decisions that affect them, the Obama Administration’s Open Government Directive issued in December 2009, and the newly-released OMB Guidance on the Use of Challenges and Prizes.

This report recaps some of the key learning from the conference, focusing on takeaways rather than giving a talk-by-talk account of the sessions. (The full agenda is available here, and speaker biographies here, both PDFs.) Quotes are by the participants and panelists except where indicated.