Everything you need to run your Innovation Challenge®

Skild | Experts in Innovation Challenges

Network of 10,000 Scouts, Easy Platform & White-Glove Services

Skild | Explore Possibilities

Why Run a Challenge?

If you’ve asked yourself this very question, welcome!

Over the course of 15 years, Skild has planned and produced more than 600 challenges, awarding upwards of $300 million in prizes. From these experiences, we’ve distilled 4 essential truths about why organizations run challenge programs in the first place. Without further ado, here they are.

Skild | Together is better

How Skild Works

Innovation challenges fail. A lot. Why? They were either poorly designed, incorrectly marketed, or deeply mismanaged. 

All challenges are initiated with the best of intentions. More often than not, they set out to gather the brightest minds and freshest perspectives, both inside and outside an organization’s walls, in order to solve an urgent problem. 

But what happens when the urgent problem can’t be addressed due to underlying problems with the challenge itself? 

Enter Skild, an agency created by challenge organizers, for challenge organizers, with one specific goal in mind: producing easy, effective, and actually enjoyable challenge programs — time and time again.

Plan

1

Understand the objectives and design the challenge.

Produce

Execute the challenge with the right tools and expertise.

2

Play

3

Engage participants and drive results.

Skild | Access a World of Innovation: 10,000+ ecosystems strong

Skild Network

Transforming Innovation Challenges into Opportunities for Growth

The success of any challenge hinges not just on being well-designed but also on the quality and quantity of submissions. This is where Skild excels.

Targeted Outreach: The Power of the Personal Touch

Our strategies harness the influence of direct, personal recommendations. We’ve cultivated the largest known database of “Innovation Evangelists'' — dedicated professionals from over 10,000 global innovation ecosystems who mentor and support rising talent. This human network effect is our superpower, creating ripples through universities, accelerators, incubators, and nonprofits to connect your challenge with the finest minds.

The Skild Approach: Precision-Matched Participation

We start by engaging with organizers and experts to construct a detailed profile of the ideal participant and craft bespoke promotional materials. Whether through email campaigns, dynamic social content, webinars, or persuasive multimedia presentations, we can elevate your challenge’s visibility and appeal.

Execution with Excellence

Our comprehensive campaign management ensures that from launch to deadline, your challenge will attract the highest caliber of applicants — and we do it all within 60 days. 

Build Your Network

Connect with us and discover how we can amplify the impact of your innovation program, grant, or fellowship. Let’s shape the future together.

Skild | Experience Effortless Management

The Skild Platform

Skild’s refined, customizable online platform is the hub of our ecosystem of services. It allows us to run, monitor, track, and report every aspect of your innovation challenge program, including detailed attribution analysis from one centralized dashboard.

Skild | Building, training, & guiding

Customer Success

Skild provides a dedicated customer success team to build out your unique platform and train you on it — not to mention guide you through the course of your challenge, addressing any needs that might come up.

Platform

Typically, this is the first thing that comes to mind when considering running a challenge. A good platform, after all, will help you to register participants, accept submissions, evaluate those submissions, and more.

Marketing

Skild offers a full-service marketing agency dedicated specifically to the world of innovation challenges. With our robust network of participants, judges, and evangelists (people who help us to promote and amplify challenges), we specialize in attracting the right audience for your one-of-a-kind program.

Design

In Skild’s experience, the word design means two very different things. Challenge design: the purpose, structure, and flow of your challenge. Website design: the challenge’s public presence in terms of its website’s appearance and messaging. 

Project Management

A successful challenge requires proper management — someone who can keep dozens of plates spinning throughout the campaign. This person must have seemingly superhuman attention to details, because these events hinge on many parts working together in harmony.

Client Services

Yes, some of our competitors offer a platform that can meet the most basic needs of your challenge. But do they help you to build out that platform and train you on it — not to mention guiding you through the course of your challenge, addressing any needs that might come up.

Reporting

Every challenge produces an abundance of insightful data on not only the participants and their submissions, but also how long they’ve worked on those submissions, the resources they used in the platform, the number of times they’ve interacted with your brand, and much more. All of this information can inform your decisions in terms of marketing, communications, and even restructuring the challenge for next time.

Skild | Notable competitions

Featured Competitions

Skild is proud to have helped so many organizations, large and small, do good. We have designed, supported, and enabled more than 600 global competitions award prizes valued over $300 million. We have been honored to work with respected organizations like:

Cisco

Cisco is committed to positively impacting 1 billion people by 2025.

As part of this ambitious global initiative, the organization realized that an innovation challenge would be a big part of their efforts — but they didn’t know where to begin. This is when Skild entered the picture. Starting in 2016, Skild helped to plan and produce the Cisco Global Problem Solver Challenge, designed to inspire and empower a generation of global problem solvers who will not only survive, but thrive, in our increasingly digital economy.

Global Problem Solver Challenge

Harbor Freight

The annual Harbor Freight Tools for Schools Prize for Teaching Excellence spotlights achievements among high school skilled trades teachers — a group of educators that is often overlooked and underappreciated. In recent years, the importance of high-quality skilled trades education has received more attention nationally because of an urgent shortage of skilled tradespeople in the workforce.

The challenge annually awards more than $1.5M to 25 outstanding skilled trades teachers and programs in US public high schools, including five Grand Prize winners of $100K each ($30K going to the teacher and $70K going to their program) and 20 Prize Winners of $50K each.

The application process is rigorous, and skilled trades teachers must be able to communicate their programs and their backgrounds in teaching — specifically, what they do for their students in the classroom and beyond.

Tools for School Prize for Teaching Excellence

data.org

With support from the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth and The Rockefeller Foundation, the data.org Challenge called for breakthrough ideas that harness the power of data science to help people and communities thrive, especially in the wake of COVID-19’s health and economic impact.

The challenge invited proposals in the focus areas of . . .

• Jobs of tomorrow: Can data insights predict trends in the labor market and connect and prepare workers for the jobs of tomorrow?

• Access to capital: How can data science help us identify micro and small businesses with the potential to grow and provide them with access to capital?

• Cities and towns: How can data and analytics help connect neighborhoods to the resources and networks they need to access opportunity, including quality education, affordable housing and childcare, decent jobs, and transportation?

Countries Participating: 49

Number of applicants: 1,200+

Prize purse: $10M

Number of winners: 8

Inclusive Growth and Recovery

Skild | Leverage our Learnings

Guides & Resources

For more than 15 years, Skild has helped organizations execute nearly 600 innovation challenges and engagement programs. We’re talking about corporate leaders seeking new avenues of growth, enterprises on social missions, government agencies planning to crowdsource new breakthroughs or engage the public, and recruiters seeking top talent from colleges and universities. Along the way, we’ve learned a lot about what makes successful programs . . . well, successful. With that in mind, we built a library containing articles, infographics, and reports that, we believe, will help you to better understand how innovation challenges work and how they can benefit you and your organization when they’re run well.

Skild | The people behind the name

About Skild

At Skild, we believe in empowering people and organizations by tapping into unheard voices and fresh perspectives. We genuinely strive to affect positive change by helping to solve problems, make discoveries, and in some small way advance society.

Anil Rathi

Founder & CEO, Skild

Empowering people by tapping into unheard voices and fresh perspectives.

I am a problem solver.

Customer Success Manager

Mona Raymundo

I ensure the Skild Platform is the most effective and customizable challenge management platform available.

Director, Engineering

Joe Raines

Ian Murphy

Outreach Director

I manage a global network of scouts and technology experts to help organizations find uncut gems.

I’m motivated by technology’s positive people effect.

Advisor

Denis Khoo

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