Over the past decade, innovation competitions have surged in popularity as tools to spark creativity and generate real-world solutions across a wide range of sectors, particularly in health, technology, and increasingly, in disaster preparedness and community resilience. From global hackathons to community-led design contests, these events tap into diverse motivations and mobilise broad networks of participants, but how effective are they?
Competitions come in many forms: open calls, challenge grants, design contests, and multi-stage innovation challenges. What they share is the ability to harness collective intelligence and incentivise problem-solving. Participants often contribute time, resources, and expertise that far exceed the value of the prize itself (MacCormack et al., 2013; Pan et al., 2017). In health and development for example, competitions have produced solutions that match or outperform traditional methods at a lower cost (Pan et al., 2017).
Similarly, in the realm of disaster preparedness, competitions have prompted context-specific innovations: from emergency shelter designs (Yılmaz, 2019) to community-led climate adaptations (eg. Tjornbo & Westley, 2012). One study of a post–Hurricane Sandy design competition identified six proposals with strong potential for boosting urban resilience (Fleming, 2017). A COVID-era hackathon generated multiple ideas to address gaps in public service delivery (Dabral et al., 2021). And in a social entrepreneurship competition, the majority of teams developed ongoing ventures focused on health and community development (Huster et al., 2017). Furthermore, recent and current competitions like the World Meteorological Organization (WMO)’s Global Integrated Flood and Drought Management Youth Competition (2025), Natural Hazards Research Australia’s Disaster Challenge and the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC)’s Solferino Academy’s Ready in 60′‘ competition, illustrate how youth, local actors, and institutions can be stimulated to come together around innovation-driven preparedness.
Some of the key benefits of competitions, specifically in the realm of disaster preparedness and community resilience strengthening include:
- Greater public awareness of risks, emergency planning, and resilience strategies
- Localised, (low-cost) solutions tailored to specific hazards and community needs
- Community ownership and trust-building, especially when local voices shape both the problems to be addressed and the solutions
- Opportunities for collaboration across sectors and disciplines
- Follow-on impact, with successful (even non-winning) ideas often securing seed funding or partnerships
However, the long-term impact of innovation competitions remains under-researched as it can be complicated to assess (eg. Lee et al., 2020). Particularly in the context of disaster risk reduction, there’s a pressing need for better evaluation tools to assess outcomes over time as innovation competitions may not always be the right tool to support solutions (eg. Goeldner et al., 2017). Additional concerns of innovation competitions include (eg. Fougère, M., & Meriläinen, 2022):
- Exclusion of marginalised voices, especially if competition design lacks community input (eg. Levidow & Papaioannou, 2018; Jimenez et al., 2025)
- Biased judging criteria or insufficient transparency in evaluation (Ulkhaq et al., 2023)
- Under-recognition of finalists and contributors beyond the winners (Tucker et al., 2018)
- Misaligned motivations, where financial incentives may lead to disengagement or ethical shortcuts (Scheiner et al., 2018)
To ensure competitions are equitable and effective, organisers should prioritise a deep understanding and respect of local contexts, design to enable inclusive participation, build in mentorship and support, and think beyond the prize to longer-term institutional support, engagement and scaling. For disaster preparedness, the value of competitions lies not just in generating ideas but in mobilising local expertise, connecting communities with institutional resources, and building lasting networks for resilience.
In short, while competitions alone can’t solve systemic issues, they can spark meaningful action and engagement, if we design them with care, equity, and long-term impact in mind.
References
Dabral, A., Bajwa, S., Shioyama, S., Chatterjee, R., & Shaw, R. (2021). Social innovation hackathon for driving innovation in disaster risk reduction (DRR). IDRiM Journal, 11(1), 64-82.
Fleming, B. (2017). ‘Rebuild by design’ in New York City: Investigating the competition process and discussing its outcomes. Ri-Vista, 15(2), 200-215.
Fougère, M., & Meriläinen, E. (2022). Exposing three dark sides of social innovation through critical perspectives on resilience. In The Dark Side of Innovation (pp. 95-112). Routledge.
Goeldner, M., Kruse, D. J., & Herstatt, C. (2017). Lead user method vs. innovation contest: An empirical comparison of two open innovation methodologies for identifying social innovation for flood Resilience in Indonesia (No. 101). Working Paper.
Hani, U., & Iulo, L. D. (2019). Community Resilience in the face of Riverine Flooding: Lessons from Resilient Competitions.
Huster, K., Petrillo, C., O’Malley, G., Glassman, D., Rush, J., & Wasserheit, J. (2017). Global social entrepreneurship competitions: incubators for innovations in global health?. Journal of Management Education, 41(2), 249-271.
Jimenez, A., Pansera, M., & Abdelnour, S. (2025). Imposing innovation: How ‘innovation speak’maintains postcolonial exclusion in Peru. World Development, 189, 106914.
Lee, S. Y., Díaz-Puente, J. M., & Vidueira, P. (2020). Enhancing rural innovation and sustainability through impact assessment: A review of methods and tools. Sustainability, 12(16), 6559.
Levidow, L., & Papaioannou, T. (2018). Which inclusive innovation? Competing normative assumptions around social justice. Innovation and Development, 8(2), 209-226.
MacCormack, A., Murray, F., & Wagner, E. (2013). Spurring innovation through competitions. MIT Sloan Management Review.
Tjornbo, O., & Westley, F. R. (2012). Game changers: the big green challenge and the role of challenge grants in social innovation. Journal of Social Entrepreneurship, 3(2), 166-183.
Pan, S.W., Stein, G., Bayus, B., Tang, W., Mathews, A., Wang, C., Wei, C. and Tucker, J.D. (2017). Systematic review of innovation design contests for health: spurring innovation and mass engagement. BMJ innovations, 3, 227.
Scheiner, C. W., Baccarella, C. V., Bessant, J., & Voigt, K. I. (2018). Participation motives, moral disengagement, and unethical behaviour in idea competitions. International Journal of Innovation Management, 22(06), 1850043.
Tucker, J. D., Pan, S. W., Mathews, A., Stein, G., Bayus, B., & Rennie, S. (2018). Ethical concerns of and risk mitigation strategies for crowdsourcing contests and innovation challenges: scoping review. Journal of medical Internet research, 20(3), e75.
Ulkhaq, M. M., Pramono, S. N., & Adyatama, A. (2023). Assessing the tendency of judging bias in student competition: a data mining approach. Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education, 15(4), 1198-1211.
Yılmaz, D. G. (2019). In Pursuit of Better Sheltering and Housing After Disasters: The Architectural Perspective Through Ideas Competitions. In Proceedings of the International Conference of Contemporary Affairs in Architecture and Urbanism-ICCAUA (Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 727-755).