Institute For The Future

Pushing Financial Lightweight Innovation

It's great to see a company that gets lightweight innovation and is willing to stick it's neck out. In partnership with NYC-based ChallengePost, Thomson Reuters is offering $25,000 in prizes to developers that create innovative mobile apps that leverage its financial data APIs.

The StreetApps Challenge is "challenging developers internationally to build the most useful, high-quality, and visually appealing applications, offering $25,000 in cash and prizes. In order to be considered for prizes, all submitted software applications must use at least one content set from the Thomson Reuters Knowledge Direct API. Applications must be installable on the iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, or Android Operating systems. Note: Developers maintain all intellectual property ownership for their submissions."

The entire contest from launch to award is just about 100 days, which seems to be emerging as the benchmark for lightweight innovation cycles.

Over the long haul, companies need to learn not just how to do these lightweight prototyping project externally with the general public, but also internally and in their existing business networks. These kinds of experiments will show them how to do that - especially how to throw out all the existing rules, barriers and organization culture obstacles to new thinking, rapid ideation, and rapid prototyping.

 

Good luck to the sponsors and contestants alike - this is one we'll watch closely.