Musings on a Milestone: 20 Humanitarian Crowd-Solving Challenges.
In late September 2026, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) launched an open-innovation challenge titled “Detecting Hidden Underground Utilities for Safer Rehabilitation in Syria” (Figure 1). SeaFreight Labs is serving as Project Advisor on the project. This is a milestone of sorts for us because this is the 20th humanitarian crowd-solving project where we have played the role of Project Advisor.
Figure 1.
This blog entry will look back on what has been accomplished over the past 6 years of humanitarian crowd-solving and share our learnings from the process of asking the global crowd for help on important humanitarian problems.
Contents
What is Humanitarian Crowd-Solving?
During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020, SeaFreight Labs launched with the intent to bring crowd-solving services to the seafreight industry. Crowd-solving is based on two key principles:
No organization has all the smart people in the world; and,
No single person, not even the smartest, can know everything or look at a problem from all perspectives.
Here’s how it works. The seeking organization publishes a description of their problem on the internet, offers a cash prize of $15,000-$50,000 if anyone can solve the entire problem, and then markets it widely for 60-90 days. After the public period has ended, the ‘Seeker’ reviews the submissions and decides if any are good enough to merit exchanging the prize money for the intellectual property of the submitted idea. As long as an organization is willing to welcome input from outside the organization, the crowd can be a great aid in pursuit of the mission. The process is described HERE.
Unfortunately, during the early days of COVID, potential customers for the service had no time to consider a new way to innovate and commercial opportunities were non-existent. It was time for a “Plan B”.
My wife observed that the capabilities of the company could be applied to any industry, not just seafreight. She suggested reaching out to humanitarian organizations that we knew to see if they would like help solving some of their most difficult, high-impact problems. The answer was ‘yes’ and humanitarian crowd-solving was born.
Humanitarian Crowd-Solving is:
Definition Clause | Discussion on Each Clause | |
a. | a tool whose use is intended… | The generic name for the process underlying Humanitarian Crowd-Solving is “Open Innovation”. This is a proven process to solicit help from outside of one’s organization. |
b. | …to enable large global humanitarian organizations… | At SeaFreight Labs, our exclusive focus is on advising global humanitarian organizations on how to use open innovation to solicit ways to accelerate their impact. In practice, only organizations with over US$1 billion of annual revenue have the scale and infrastructure to be able to effectively execute a humanitarian challenge and drive adoption of new innovations. |
c. | …to do their work more effectively (better, faster and/or cheaper) by… | Open Innovation can be used to discover improved ways for a humanitarian organization to do its work. The objective is to look for dramatic process improvements that enable the humanitarian organization to have a greater positive impact and/or impact more people in need. |
d. | …tapping into the knowledge and expertise of the global crowd… | No single organization has enough smart people to solve every one of their program-related constraints. When addressed properly, the global crowd can often bring new perspectives and experiences to a situation. When structured as a prize challenge, the humanitarian organization can recruit hundreds of new partners to propose scores of different approaches to eliminating or mitigating the targeted constraint. |
e. | …to find new ways to do important program-related tasks of the sponsoring humanitarian organization. | About 75% of professionally-hosted challenges pay prize awards to winning Solvers. We have had similar results with the humanitarian challenges advised by SeaFreight Labs. This level of success provides a lot of confidence that the global crowd can be a valuable partner to a humanitarian organization by providing tangible help for the program and mission of the organization. |
Figure 2.
Overview of the Program
Since 2020, we have served as Project Advisor for four global humanitarian organizations: Habitat for Humanity, World Vision, International Rescue Committee (“IRC”) and United Nations Development Programme – Crisis Bureau (“UNDP”). You can read case studies of the first 8 projects HERE and a case study of the IRC projects HERE.
Figure 3 summarizes the crowd-solving activity of these 4 NGOs. The entire process is really amazing. An organization can be located anywhere in the world with a problem from any domain and there are hundreds of individuals that will register an interest in learning more about the problem. From this group, scores to hundreds will submit a proposed solution and these people will come from all over the world.
The process has had a tremendous success rate. 17 of our 19 completed challenges have awarded prize money so the Seeker can obtain rights to the submitted solutions. This is an 89.5% success rate! Figure 4 shows how geographically diverse the set of winners for 17 awarded challenges have been. Winners have come from 25 different countries with India being the source of the most winners.
Figure 3.
Figure 4.
Highlights of the Individual Challenges
An overview of each of the projects for each organization is in Figures 5-7. At Habitat for Humanity, we supported the Terwilliger Center for Innovation in Shelter as the Seeker. At World Vision, we supported the WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) team. At the IRC, we supported the Airbel Impact Lab. And, at UNDP, we supported the Crisis Bureau headquarters office. Read the details of awarded challenges HERE. Read the details of unawarded challenges HERE. Read the details of currently open challenges HERE.
The problems submitted to the crowd shared a few characteristics. They came from the specialized domains of the Seeker. For example, the challenges posted by Habitat for Humanity all were related to housing. Other important categories were sanitation, health, water and crisis response. All of the problem statements had a challenging cost constraint. My blog on a ‘good’ problem is HERE.
Habitat for Humanity & World Vision Crowd-Solving Projects
Figure 5.
International Rescue Committee Crowd-Solving Projects
Figure 6.
UNDP-Crisis Bureau Crowd-Solving Projects
Figure 7.
Program Successes
Everyone wants to declare their projects to be a success. One can brag about success. It feels good to rack up the victories. But, maybe we can learn more from talking about failures. In this blog, I want to think about both the successes and failures of the 20 challenges we have supported.
Crowd-Solving as a Process
On a simple numerical basis, 17 of the 19 completed crowd-solving challenges awarded prize money. Paying an award to a solver in exchange for the intellectual property of their submission indicates that the Seeker wanted to obtain ownership of the idea and saw it as something new and valuable. This success rate of 89.5% is very impressive in the innovation realm.
The 2 challenges that did not award prize money were both for World Vision in 2021 (see Projects 3 and 4 in Figure 5). The team’s conclusion was that Project 3 failed because a cost-effective solution that honored World Vision’s constraints did not exist at that time. Sometimes, a problem is too hard and there is no reasonable solution. This challenge appeared to fall into that category.
Project 4 for World Vision was a business process problem that the Seeker knew was unlikely to find a winning solution, but they decided to launch it anyway. The solver engagement was somewhat limited because the problem was not ‘typical’ for Innocentive’s platform. And the submissions were therefore limited as well. The team concluded that this problem was not a good fit for the Innocentive crowd and that it may not have had a solution that the crowd could offer.
Crowd-Solving as a Tool to Innovate New Ways to Execute
The four humanitarian organizations that have done crowd-solving engagements did not engage in crowd-solving as an academic exercise. Instead, they hoped that the global crowd could help them improve their programs in a dramatic way by eliminating a long-standing problem or roadblock. Each challenge was asking for help that might open new programmatic doors.
Engineering for Change (“E4C”), a division of ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers), has a graphic that explains how difficult it is to introduce something new to the market (Figure 8). Crowd-solving awards prizes for solutions at the idea, concept or early-prototype stages. Moving through all the steps after this requires mature organization innovation capabilities AND the discipline and patience necessary to get to the finish line.
Figure 8.
The challenges we have run were of three general types: Ideation, Conceptual Prototype and Tested Prototype (see Figure 9).
An Ideation challenge is a brainstorming-type challenge soliciting new ideas. The hope is that there will be something so interesting that it merits further investment of time and effort.
A Conceptual-Prototype challenge is seeking a solution that is based on actual tested concepts and components. It should be possible to build or make the idea to test if it could work but the solver is not expected to do this work as part of the challenge process.
A Tested-Prototype challenge is looking for the solver to actually build or make their idea and prove that it can work as requested. They typically submit a video of their prototype as part of the submission.
Figure 9.
At the writing of this blog in December 2026, no innovations generated in our humanitarian crowd-solving efforts have yet achieved the “Product Launch” goal. But there is a lot of progress on a good number of projects. Quite a few have had field testing of prototypes. A couple projects have led to follow-on design work to refine designs. One project is being pursued in a joint venture with a regional government in the Philippines. Visit the ‘Post-Challenge Activity’ page for updates.
The type of challenge directly affects the odds of a challenge leading to a “Product Launch”. Of the 7 Ideation challenges we have run, only 1 directly led to follow-on activity on a submitted idea. The first IRC challenge seeking ideas for improved safety in female latrines led to extensive follow-on work regarding improved lighting that is still continuing as of this time. One other ideation challenge, for Habitat for Humanity, became part of the process of concept development that eventually led to the construction of a model home using construction and demolition debris as the raw material. The ideas submitted in the challenge influenced the thinking of the team in a way that helped the project achieve a key milestone. A third ideation challenge, for the IRC, was designed as a fast and inexpensive way to get a “technology landscape” of traditional and modern ways to reduce disaster risk in rural Afghanistan or Somalia. In 32 days, the crowd submitted 36 different proposals and this input diversified what the IRC could find from internet and chatbot sources.
The other four ideation challenges didn’t receive ideas interesting enough to pursue. Although the sample size is small, it makes sense that an Ideation challenge is a ‘high-risk/high-reward’ effort that is unlikely to find anything new but if it does, the discovery may be exceptionally valuable.
The 7 completed Conceptual Prototype challenges all led to follow-on development and testing (the 2 UNDP challenges are still too soon after the winner decision to expect any forward movement yet). As one would expect, the testing has discovered significant problems in the design of the initial prototypes. The ability of the Seeker to continue development has a big impact on what happens next.
It is very interesting that the 3 completed Tested-Prototype challenges have progressed their solutions the furthest toward the “Product Launch” goal. The two Habitat for Humanity challenges and the one IRC challenge are all actively engaged in field testing and iterative improvement of their designs.
“Sweet Spot” for Success
If success is defined as getting an innovation to the “Product Launch” stage of the E4C progression, we can make a few observations about how to create the best odds for success:
Seeker Must be Set Up for Follow-on Work. The Seeking humanitarian organization needs to have a capability to take the output of a challenge and spend considerable time and effort to test and improve it. Both Habitat for Humanity and IRC have dedicated innovation teams charged with doing this type of work so these organizations were well prepared to take a promising innovation and carry it forward. Unfortunately, World Vision does not have a dedicated innovation team and the amount of iterative effort required was outside of their day-to-day capabilities.
Challenge Type Determines Likelihood of Follow-On Work. An Ideation challenge is unlikely to receive truly new and valuable ideas. We have had enough positive outcomes that I still think they are valuable but the Seeker must be prepared for disappointing results with this type of problem statement. Alternatively, the two types of prototype challenges, if they award a prize, are quite likely to lead to follow-on R&D.
Proper Problem Selection is Vital. The two failed challenges at World Vision happened early in the stream of 20 challenges. After those two problems did not solicit winning submissions, we expended more effort looking for ‘good’ problems that would be high impact AND have a good chance that the global crowd could contribute new and useful ideas. Crowd-solving is not suitable for every problem inside a humanitarian organization. Filtering to find the right type of problems is a key part of best practices in this type of innovation work.
What Other Good Things Happen While Humanitarian Crowd-Solving?
As discussed in the previous section, the primary objective of Humanitarian Crowd-Solving is a “Product Launch” of a solution to a high-impact problem of the Seeker. Searching for these solutions is the only reason to invest the time and effort into a crowd-solving project. But, if one is expending the effort, there are a number of ‘fringe benefits’ that can occur in the typical best-practices process. These include:
Fund-raising
Partnerships of many types
Volunteers
New types of publicity
This section will highlight examples of each of these side effects.
Fund-Raising
A humanitarian organization must always be looking for ways to fund its on-going and future work. The best example of how a crowd-solving challenge supported this effort is the Habitat for Humanity challenge #4a, seeking ways to reduce the incidence of malaria in low-income families in Kenya. The challenge turned out to be the beginning of a program called “Healthy Housing”. The energy around the program became a key part of an application to Wellcome Trust which, in 2022, led to the award of a $2.5 million grant to study “Effect of housing modification on indoor thermal comfort and malaria vector densities in hot and humid zones of western and coastal Kenya”.
The work made possible by this grant led to a peer-reviewed paper in “Nature Medicine” in early 2026 titled “Housing modifications for heat adaptation, thermal comfort and malaria vector control in rural African settlements”. Nature Medicine is generally considered one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world.
Partnerships
A humanitarian organization always has more needs it wishes it could respond to than it has capacity for response. This unfortunate fact drives the need to look for partnerships that can extend the reach of the organization. The public nature of an open-innovation project and the broad invitation seeking help demonstrate that the humanitarian organization has a problem and they are looking for help on solving the problem. Some examples of new partnerships created in conjunction with challenges are below.
Habitat for Humanity and KEMRI (Kenya Malaria Research Institute). KEMRI is a State Corporation established in Kenya in 1979. The Institute currently ranks as one of the leading Centers of excellence in health research both in Africa as well as globally. Their mission is to improve human health and quality of life through research, capacity building, innovation and service delivery. They are the research partners that execute scientific projects for Habitat for Humanity in their Healthy Housing initiative. The Wellcome Trust grant mentioned above is executed by their researchers.
Habitat for Humanity and Lapu-Lapu City. Habitat for Humanity is partnering with the government of Lapu-Lapu City in the Philippines to strengthen housing resilience and enhance fire safety for low-income families across the city. The hope is that this partnership may lead to wide adoption of the Beam Monolith design, the winner of Habitat challenge #1.
International Rescue Committee and Engineering for Change (“E4C”). Engineering for Change is a division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). E4C prepares, educates and activates the international technical workforce to improve the quality of life of people and the planet. E4C provided skilled judges for one of the IRC challenges. They also provided research team members to do detailed design on the Fossil-Fuel-Free Irrigation project.
Individual Volunteers
The solvers and judges for a specific humanitarian challenge come from all over the world. Usually, these individuals see the project as a normal business transaction. But sometimes, they get excited about the vision of the organization for a specific solution and they volunteer their time and expertise to move a project forward. Some examples are below.
International Rescue Committee and a winning solver in New Zealand. Over the past 3 years, a winning solver has volunteered his time and skills to help develop a new lighting solution for latrines. This solution is now being field tested in Nigeria
International Rescue Committee and Dartmouth College students. Students at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College volunteered to work on detailed design for the Fossil-Fuel-Free Irrigation project as their 2025-26 Capstone project.
UNDP and a challenge judge. UNDP benefited from the skills of a volunteer judge during the judging phase of their 2nd challenge. This individual has offered to help UNDP with implementation of the solution.
Publicity
A humanitarian organization can always benefit from promoting its successes to existing and potential donors. Some of the projects are well-suited to creating video content which can be used to promote the innovation efforts of the organization. Selected examples are below.
Habitat for Humanity announced the winner of their Challenge #1 to make homes with no foundations more resilient in typhoons and earthquakes (6:37) – Click HERE.
IRC described the design of the Fossil-Fuel-Free Irrigation project when recruiting students for additional design work on their challenge # 3a (4:35) – Click HERE.
Innovations in Crowd-Solving
Crowd-solving has been used as a tool to solve difficult problems since at least the Longitude Act of 1714. So, the idea of asking the global crowd for help in exchange for a cash prize is not new. But, the details of how it works are always changing as practitioners strive to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the process. This section highlights innovations in the process since our first open-innovation challenges went public in mid-2020.
Changes in the Relationship Between Seekers and Solvers
In 2020, the standard process for running a crowd-solving challenge was to provide anonymity for both solver and seeker. The solvers were only known by a “submission ID” and the seeker didn’t divulge its identity. However, over time, this dynamic has completely changed. Now, the seeker’s identity is valuable for recruiting new solvers to the problem. And solvers can ask questions directly to the seeker in a number of different ways. Some specific changes are:
Webinars. The standard humanitarian crowd-solving challenge now includes two public webinars to allow the seekers to personally explain the problem and why it is important. Solvers can submit questions in advance of each webinar and can ask them interactively during the webinar. The webinars are recorded so they can be replayed after the event. On a recent challenge, the first webinar had up to 40 attendees during the 1-hour event with an additional 227 plays leading to 66 hours of video viewing. The 2nd webinar had up to 36 attendees during its 1-hour event with an additional 63 plays.
Videos. To reduce the risk that a solver would exclusively use AI to generate a submission, we recently began asking the solver to submit a 2-minute video explaining their submission. Of course, if the solver is the narrator of the video, their identity becomes known by the judges.
Pitch Days. A recent challenge whittled the submissions down to five finalists. Each finalist was then asked to do a 1-hour ‘pitch’ of their proposal to the judging panel. The identity of each solver becomes known during this process.
Changes in Promotion Strategies
The maxim of crowd-solving is that the more people that know about a specific challenge, the greater the chance to find a winning solver. So, the Seeker needs to invest time and effort into broadcasting the challenge far and wide. The humanitarian organizations that we have worked with on these 20 challenges have excellent marketing and PR departments and they have all done a fine job of promoting each challenge through press releases and social media. This is all standard practice.
The new innovation during the time of running these challenges has been in the recruitment of external marketing partners. Often, the most effective partners have actually been competitors of the hosting organization. HeroX deserves a special shoutout because they publicized challenges for all four organizations we worked with, all for free. They wanted to contribute to finding a solution to the problems and they deployed their platform and crowd to the problem. I am extremely grateful to them.
Other marketing partners also participated in various challenges. These included Engineering for Change, MIT Solve and Freelancer.com. All publicized the challenges to their audiences at no charge to the Seeker. At least one winning Solver resulted from this marketing effort.
Innocentive made two key changes to their launch process that are noteworthy. First, they changed the rules of challenge posting so that anyone can read the full challenge description without registering for the challenge. Up through 2021, the only way to read the full challenge definition was to register on the platform. This ‘friction’ may have prevented potential solvers from learning about the problem, so they eliminated the requirement in 2022.
Second, they invented the idea of ‘pre-registration’ for a challenge. While the Seeker is finalizing the details of the definition, prize amount and marketing strategy, Innocentive now publishes a ‘teaser’ for the challenge and invites solvers to pre-register to get more information. This attracts skilled solvers to the problem and helps assure that the problem will get even more visibility over a longer period of time.
Changes in Judging Strategies
Judging of a humanitarian challenge is a multi-round process as the Seeker works to reduce the solution set down to one or more winners. There are two recent innovations in this process that are useful. First, Innocentive now has an AI agent called “Jen” that reads each submission and compares it to the stated evaluation criteria. The agent assigns a score of Green/Yellow/Red to each submission to help human judges have a consistent opinion to use for validation.
Second, a number of recent challenges have used external judges to supplement the internal resources of the humanitarian organization. These individuals have been subject-matter experts and helped assure that the most valuable submission was chosen as a winner. The process of recruiting these judges is an important skill for a seeker with a technical problem.
Conclusion
We started doing humanitarian crowd-solving by accident. I had wanted to use SeaFreight Labs to do meaningful work but did not know that it would not involve the Seafreight industry in any way. I think I became comfortable with this fact because of our participation in the Pledge-1% movement (Read my 2020 blog on why we joined the movement HERE). And now we have been Project Advisor for 20 humanitarian crowd-solving challenges!
In this 6 years of engagement with humanitarian innovation, we have constantly improved on the process of tapping into the global crowd to seek help for high-impact, difficult problems. But the underlying vision has remained the same. I think that one can achieve more when working in a team than when working in a silo. The bigger the team, the more skills that are available and the greater advances that are made possible. The global crowd is the biggest team of all to partner with a humanitarian organization. This is the heart of what we have been doing over these years.
I am grateful to the leadership at each of the humanitarian organizations that took a chance on SeaFreight Labs and crowd-solving. I am proud of the results of our joint work and I am hopeful that a number of the innovations discovered will continue to mature and eventually make it to “Product Launch”. SeaFreight Labs intends to offer whatever help we can to our partner organizations to help them achieve this desired outcome.
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