To date, GrabCAD has hosted dozens of Challenges with an average of 83 entries per Challenge and total number of entries well over 3,000! Let’s see more options how to tap into this huge opportunity and harness our community of hundreds of thousands of members.
GRABCAD PRIVATE CHALLENGES
Many Sponsors wish to harvest the benefits of crowd-sourcing, however, prefer their sensitive Internal intellectual property, business plans, strengths, weaknesses, potential solutions and even their identity not to be revealed to the general public or their competitors. For these customers GrabCAD offers the ability to host "Private Challenges", where the Challenge is only offered to a select sub-group of individuals. Selection of these individuals may be based on geographic location, identified skill-sets (CAD software, engineering expertise, etc.) vertical industries, or by invitation-only to a pre-approved "virtual staff".
As with all Challenges, the Sponsor retains intellectual property rights to all entries, with the option to choose whether submissions are publicly viewable or not. Corporations with large pools of engineers are even using GrabCAD as a platform for their internal projects, providing access to Challenges solely to their own employee population.
All entrants must accept the Terms and Conditions prior to uploading their entry to GrabCAD: http://grabcad.com/challenges/terms In addition the Sponsor has the ability to define and set additional terms and rules for his Challenge.
WHAT OPTIONS DO WE HAVE?
The following options enable a Challenge Sponsor to customize the rules of each Challenge to their particular needs:
Option 1 - Public Challenge/Private Entries For sponsors who would like the widest possible dissemination of their Challenge to GrabCAD's entire community and web surfers outside of GrabCAD's registered user base, this is useful. However, sponsors often prefer the ideas generated to be kept confidential. Thus a Public Challenge with Private Entries is the optimal choice. By offering the Challenge to our community of 270,000+ engineers, social networks, and casual web surfers, the greatest number of innovative contributions will be generated. This is especially effective when the details of the Challenge problem are not highly confidential but the solutions need to be.
An example of this type of challenge would be: http://grabcad.com/challenges/bicycle-crank-weight-reduction
The entries are visible only for the Sponsor and contestants do not see their competitors submissions.
Option 2 - Private Challenge For Sponsors who wish to keep all the details of their Challenge exclusive to the GrabCAD community of engineers and not permit the public at-large to view the Challenge or submitted solutions, the Private Challenge is preferred. Only GrabCAD members who are logged in to their accounts can see the Challenge and submitted solutions.
Option 3 - Private Challenge/White Label For those Sponsors who would like to keep their very identity or association with a Challenge a secret, the White Label is branded as a GrabCAD-sponsored contest.
Option 4 - Private Challenge For those Sponsors who have created a "trusted virtual engineering team" within GrabCAD's community, or for firms or corporations who would simply like to use the GrabCAD platform for hosting internal competitions among their own employees, the Private Challenge mechanism enables the Sponsor to assemble and control a specific group of invitees who may see and enter the Challenge.
Option 5 – Invitational Challenge Sponsors put out a request for GrabCAD users with a particular skill set and background, including or not including details about the Challenge and the Prize. GrabCAD helps to filter out engineers with necessary skills and background to be invited to participate. Those selected sign the necessary documents after the vetting process is done. The second stage is the challenge.
