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.

https://youtu.be/ex5pw8pgmJ8

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!