This month’s #4change conversation was around Challenge Competitions for Social Innovation.  Aside from the team here at #4change, we also had some other great folks join us during the chat.

Our 3 questions for this chat were:

1. How can challenges/competitions be used to discover, support, and accelerate social change projects and solutions?
2. What are the different types of competitions and which work best in driving change?
3. How can challenges support collaboration btw projects?

We also discussed a developing a taxonomy of competitions with the following criteria:

1. who votes
   
2. who for
   
3. prize
   
4. geo
   
5. timeline
6. sector
7. criteria (collaboration?)
8. implementation tools

Participants also shared some great links throughout.  Two key takeaways for me were:

• the potential for future collaboration with other projects should be put into the judging criteria
• competitions can surface stories and causes that might not otherwise get any attention

What’s your take?  Feel free to comment below and tweet it out!

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