  In an increasingly connected and networked world, the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration (NASA) recognizes the value of the public as a
strategic partner in addressing some of our most pressing challenges. The
agency is working to more effectively harness the expertise, ingenuity, and
creativity of individual members of the public by enabling, accelerating, and
scaling the use of open innovation approaches including prizes, challenges, and
crowdsourcing. As NASA's use of open innovation tools to solve a variety of
types of problems and advance of number of outcomes continues to grow,
challenge design is also becoming more sophisticated as our expertise and
capacity (personnel, platforms, and partners) grows and develops. NASA has
recently pivoted from talking about the benefits of challenge-driven
approaches, to the outcomes these types of activities yield. Challenge design
should be informed by desired outcomes that align with NASA's mission. This
paper provides several case studies of NASA open innovation activities and maps
the outcomes of those activities to a successful set of outcomes that
challenges can help drive alongside traditional tools such as contracts, grants
and partnerships.
