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Lumina Foundation

Crowdsourcing with the right combination of platform, people and process

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Lumina Foundation is an independent, private, US-based foundation on a mission to expand student access to and success in education beyond high school. Founded in 2000, Lumina Foundation works with governmental, non-profit and private-sector organizations to extend learning opportunities to all.

Lumina Foundation engaged with InnoCentive to create Challenges that would stimulate new approaches to help modernize the US higher education system, that would ultimately meet the needs of the future workplace.

“I found an experienced crowdsourcing partner with 3Ps: platform, people and process.”

Kiko Suarez
VP, Lumina Foundation

The Challenge

  • Lumina Foundation’s mission is to build a higher education system in the US that is fit for the challenges of 21st-century life.
  • With many companies trying to understand what the employee of the future will look like, and young individuals facing the pressures of a globalized workforce, many have a stake in modernizing the education system and its interface with working life.
  • In the “Quantified Work Challenge”, Lumina asked solvers to find innovative ways to track “career health” through personal data.

The Solutions

  • The winner, Paul Dwayne, proposed a method for automatic skills assessment, based on social network analysis.
  • In a similar way to Google’s Page Rank algorithm, the method harnesses the collective intelligence that people have about themselves, through analyzing keywords in emails.
  • The system assists identification of high performers, and delivers personalized learning recommendations, while also being industry-agnostic, and not placing any additional burden on company operations.

The Results

  • Several of the solutions are viable, implementable and potentially attractive to large organizations.
  • The high profile of the challenge, with the help of its exposure at The Economist’s Human Potential Forum, drew attention to Lumina Foundation’s mission and the underlying issue.
  • The challenge spurred innovators to come forward with ideas, and also mobilized entrepreneurs to become actors for change in this field.

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