ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on sustainability-related crowdsourcing initiatives aimed at high school, university, and graduate-level students. The campaigns or contests are sponsored by large companies (such as Citi, Dell, Henkel, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Schneider Electric), high school and university-level academic institutions, government and international bodies (e.g., USAID), NGOs and non-profits, and innovation accelerators, often in collaboration. We look in particular at campaigns, contests, and challenges engaging students to put forward research, ideas, innovations, and business ideas on a wide range of environmental and social issues, but include several examples where challenges were open to experts and professions but student teams emerged as winners. Also highlighted are illustrations of crowdsourcing used to improve education, or of academic institutions leading or partnering in sponsoring contests collaborating to build prototypes or test promising innovations. Open innovation and crowdsourcing applied to student engagement and development, education, academic institutional effectiveness, and knowledge creation and application is presented as a powerful lever in creating three-dimensional learning and teaching.
This chapter covers in-depth case studies:
1. CleanSeas Innovation Challenge
2. Dell Social Innovation Challenge
3. USAID Engaging College Students to Impact Trafficking
4. MIT Climate COLAB
5. NYU Affordability Initiative
Additionally, over 20 annotated examples are described.
