How We’re Using Innovation Challenges To Improve Quality Of Life In Our Community

“We only serve the private sector because, well, the government– it’s too complicated. There are so many obstacles. Too much bureaucracy.”

“But, aren’t you focused on using automation and AI to redirect waste from landfills?” I exclaimed, “to up-cycle what would otherwise be trash into source materials for the circular economy? Surely communities could benefit from your solution. ”

“Yes. But, we prefer to work directly with landfills or waste management companies. They are privately owned. Governments can use our platform, but we don’t work directly with them.”

This is a brief excerpt from a recent conversation with the founder of a fast-growing waste management tech company that currently operates in 14 states (and counting). It resounded an all too familiar refrain and prompted me to ask a question to which few have yet to find an answer:

How might we bridge the gap between innovative solutions and local institutions to improve quality of life in communities?

Who Is Up For The Challenge?

Traditionally, government or public sector organizations launch open calls or structured competitions to address complex public problems ranging from environmental, policy, economic or social issues. These public innovation challenges, also known as government innovation or civic innovation challenges typically engage a broad range of players — from companies to entrepreneurs to entire communities and civic organizations.

There are many well known efforts of this kind, including:

• Global competitions, like XPRIZE Foundation, which designs and manages large-scale, high-profile, incentivized prizes in five areas: learning; exploration; energy and environment; global development; and life sciences. It has allocated over $300 million toward more than 27 distinct prizes ranging from the $30 million Google Lunar XPRIZE, the $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE, the $2.25 million Nokia Sensing XCHALLENGE, the $2 million Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE, and the $15 million Global Learning XPRIZE.
• Government led competitions, such as the US Department of Transportation’s $40 million Smart City Challenge designed to incentivize cities to look for innovative ways to revolutionize their transportation systems.
• Private Sector or Philanthropy led competitions, like Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Mayors Challenge, which is a competition designed to spark innovative, replicable ideas for improving cities that awards $1 million each to help implement breakthrough ideas and share learnings to other cities around the world.

How We’re Challenging Convention

Miami-Dade Innovation Authority’s (MDIA) Public Innovation Challenge is certainly not the first of its kind. Yet, yet our approach differs entirely from many others. First, we’re redefining how and where we source challenge concepts and opportunities. Second, we’re shifting the proverbial north star from “idea generation” to “value validation” as we collaborate with partners in government and subject matter experts who help challenge winning startups test their solutions in real-world commercial settings. Finally, we’re intentionally focusing our efforts on issues that when solved have the potential to improve quality of life for a significant portion of our local community and others in similarly situated metro centers around the world.

From The Private Market To The Public Domain

We believe that the innovative solutions to our greatest challenges exist — somewhere. The problem is that they often remain siloed in the private markets. That’s why MDIA intentionally casts a wide net to source technology responsive to our public challenges. We are actively engage our growing network of pipeline partners (investors, startups and tech / entrepreneurial support organizations) who help us discover and recruit the most promising startups from across the globe. In this sense, we serve as a bridge between the world’s most promising innovators and our local public sector.

We also recognize that innovation can come from anywhere — including zip codes and regions that are traditionally overlooked and underestimated. The ability to locate compelling opportunities for innovation to drive change can come from the most unexpected places, including from the talented people who keep our economic engines running or inclusive public engagement efforts, such as crowdsourcing or direct citizen feedback, both of which ensure that the scope of problems we define align with the needs and expectations of the community.

MDIA’s open portal aptly reflects our open-door policy to all ideas. If your company has an innovative solution, or you are a community member with a suggestion for a future Public Innovation Challenge, submit your proposal online.

Transforming Obstacles Into Opportunity

At MDIA, we’re investing at least $1 million per year through our Public Innovation Challenge program into innovative ideas. We’re also working alongside our partners in local government and institutions to help the winning early stage companies both test and validate their technology as well as deliver market-ready solutions.A specific aim of this work is to de-risk future venture or other capital investment into winning companies by helping them more demonstrate product-to-market fit in the United States.

Additionally, in a given year, MDIA endeavors to engage at least 300 startups and invest in a minimum of 12 novel solutions to local public challenges. This continuous flywheel of Public Innovation Challenges — at least 3 competitions per year– will help to accelerate the pace of discovery and commercialization of technologies that address pressing local issues.

Shared Challenges Become Scalable Solutions

MDIA launches and oversees public innovation challenges across five (5) priority verticals (climate, health, housing, mobility and education/opportunity).

This broad focus allows us to tap into a wide range of expertise, both regionally and globally, as well as incentivize investment in scalable solutions. We view scale in two ways.

First, we select challenges that best leverage the well developed operational infrastructure and customer networks that our testing partners use to deliver valuable services and resources to local residents on a daily basis. Typically, early stage companies would need to accumulate significant investments or assemble large team to match the reach, market penetration and presence of the existing economic engines with whom MDIA partners. Therefore, the most effective challenges are able to fast track the deployment of novel technologies through strategic testing partnerships, expertly curated by MDIA.

Second, we consider challenges that cover a broad spectrum of issues that not only impact Miami-Dade County, but are also shared by other communities in our region and world-wide. For example, Public Innovation Challenge №1 focused on seeking solutions to beneficially repurpose Sargassum seaweed, a brown micro-algae that inundates the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico and Southeastern Florida coastlines. Ultimately, the solutions we validate in Miami-Dade County here have clear and immediate opportunities for international application and expansion.

Public innovation challenges, including MDIA’s very own, serve as an invaluable mechanism to gain access to and to amplify ingenious solutions to our most pressing societal issues. Together, we are embarking on journey of using innovation in alignment with its true purpose — to improve the human condition — and in our case, to enhance quality of life and drive better community outcomes right here in the 305.