November 25, 2019 Celebrating Enterprise Innovators: The Topcoder Innovation Awards

At Topcoder, we embrace the bold and celebrate those who find new ways to ramp productivity and push enterprise innovation forward. We thought it was high time to publicly recognize all the amazing innovation driven by our customers on our platform, so for the first time ever, live at TCO19, we recognized the winners of our Topcoder Innovation Awards.

Woven into the fabric of the Innovation Summit, the winners were announced live on stage. Presented in five categories, the awards recognize excellence in open-talent (aka crowdsourced) innovation, from the most creative use of the Topcoder platform to the projects and programs that reach millions in the public sector.

We’d like to formally recognize the nominees in each category and of course, share who took home the hardware for their innovative work. Please help us in celebrating and recognizing our following customers and partners!

Power User Award

Beyond an advocate, this award celebrated our customers that use Topcoder in brand new ways and got significant buy-in to do big things.

Nominees:

Michael Alexander – HCL

Richard Copsey – OCCIDENTAL PETROLEUM (formerly ANADARKO)

Alexandre Dray, Dennis Grinberg & Luiz Huet de Bacellar – EATON

Alex Duong & Caleb Tseng – MICROSOFT

Kashif Razi – ZURICH

And the Winner Is:

Eaton, the foremost authority for power control, integrated physical security systems and power boards. Their winning project implemented a dynamic data model allowing years of code-free upgradeability to meet the needs of their future hardware platforms.

Cutting Edge Award

Big, bold, and innovative, the winner in this category used Topcoder to get something truly challenging done.

Nominees:

Alok Kumar & Rick Sullivan – Cognitive Email Triage – DXC

Karim Lakhani – Harvard Tumor Hunt, Laboratory for Innovation Sciences (LISH) – HARVARD

Paul Hlivko, Luke Faeth & Dan McCrady – Crowd-Powered Devops – WELLMARK

Ravi Chandran & Sreerajpathiyan Sivadasan – SRIMS & TOSCA Projects – BT GROUP

And the Winner Is:

BT Group, the largest provider of fixed-line, broadband and mobile services in the UK, won for a project that consolidated different types of network inventory, physical, logical and virtual, resulting in significant time and cost savings.

Wipro Partnership Award

This award recognized our Wipro partners who helped world-class organizations begin, scale, and succeed with on-demand talent.

Nominees:

Puneet Gupta, Rakesh Kumar & Aralaiah Velpula – MICROSOFT

Ross Williamson – AVIVA

Sathish V Jagadeesan & Palanisamy Senthilkumar – ZURICH

Tariq Rana – BT GROUP

And the Winner Is:

Microsoft. The award went to the crowdtesting program that helps the Microsoft Teams product team perform testing every seven days, like clockwork. Through smart integrations and on demand talent, Microsoft bursts up an army of QA engineers every seventh day to more quickly and accurately identify bugs, helping their team maintain and exceed their ambitious product goals.

Hear Alex Duong and Caleb Tseng of Microsoft discuss how they’ve worked with Wipro and Topcoder to push the boundaries of product testing velocity and coverage through crowdtesting.

Public Sector Award

Government has big problems to solve and the impact can be felt by tens of millions of people, if not more. This award recognized the very boldest team using open-talent in the federal government space. 

Nominees:

Marc Apgar, Marcus Sanger & Nathan Meidl – Geolocation Algorithm Challenge – US SPECIAL OPERATIONS COMMAND (SOCOM)

Jen Beardsley & Ken Nowak – Long Term Weather Prediction- US BUREAU OF RECLAMATION (USBR)

Terese Manley & Christine Task – Differential Privacy Project – NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS AND TECHNOLOGY (NIST)

And the Winner Is:

NIST took home the award for delivering a step-change in the research world of data de-identification. This complex work seeks to impact how public and sensitive data is shared, securely.

Program of the Year

The winning program helped deliver tremendous value to their organization while challenging Topcoder to be even better. The nominated teams all demonstrated true boldness and scaled their use of the passion economy in impressive ways!

Nominees:

ANADARKO

MICROSOFT

T-MOBILE

And the Winner Is:

T-Mobile, where wide adoption, a large variety of challenging and successful projects, and an outstanding partnership shaped the success our organizations realized together in 2019.

This is a new tradition we look forward to continuing at TCO20 and beyond. Celebrating innovation is an important part of spotlighting the year’s greatest success stories while showing the world how open talent models are fueling innovation and changing the process of solution-finding for the better. At Topcoder we will continue to champion the bold!

Congratulations to all of our nominees and winners!