Challenge Overview

Our client, a company in the food industry wants to get new insights into their products, their market position, industry trends, and competitor performances.

We’re starting from scratch - goal of ideation is to find relevant public data sources, propose how to crawl and use them to get new insights (there is no provided dataset).

Your task in this challenge is to learn about the current state of the industry, find usable data sources and suggest how that data could be used to gain new insights.

Ideal outcome of this challenge is a document containing an analysis of data sources, a proposal on how to crawl and model them and an explanation of new insights that we can create from that data model. We're looking to get insights of the industry sector, not specifically insights about our clients products

NOTE: There is no coding required in this challenge, it is a pure ideation challenge.
 

Background

Infant Nutrition is one of the fastest-growing sectors in the food industry with our client as the leading player across geographies. Growth of the global infant nutrition market is being propelled by factors such as: 

• Increase in working mother population dependent on processed infant nutrition products

• Higher spending on baby health

• Rising demand for organic baby food

• Growth in disposable income in emerging economies

Actual products in the industry can be grouped by formula type

• First infant formula

• Follow up formula

• Growing up formula

• Specialty baby formula

Or by the type of baby food

• Prepared food

• Dried food

• Other baby foods

 

Task Detail

The high-level goal of this challenge is to find available data sources and demonstrate what new insights can be developed by crawling those data sources. You are not required to do any coding in this challenge - the accent is on finding good data sources and propose how they can be used to generate new insights into the infant nutrition industry.

 

With that in mind, note that we’re not looking for simple insights like for example twitter hashtag analysis that outputs the list of most used tags - we’re looking for more creative insights as in something that people working in the client company haven’t thought of. 

 

Combining different data sources to generate more interesting insights is encouraged. The data sets that you propose don’t need to be in the form where we can just pull out the insights directly - it is ok if we would need to use some forecasting, modeling or learning based on that data to ultimately get new insights - this has to clearly be described in your submission (no actual data science algorithms/models are needed at this stage - it is sufficient to explain that for example it is required to use the crawled data to forecast some useful value - building such forecast would be the scope of a future challenge, but still the expectations from the proposal should be realistic). Also, don't limit your proposals to ideas that are "easy" to implement - it's totally fine to include ideas where we would need to put a lot of effort and detail into actually implementing what you proposed, but make sure you clearly describe the benefits and expected outcomes.

 

Note that you will likely need to first read a lot about the infant nutrition industry to get some sense of product types, major brands, trends, etc.

To get you started, here are some data sources and models that could be used:

• White papers from WHO, United Nations for Health, Children

• World Economic Forum whitepapers or news  impacting/influencing Malnutrition and related Health Challenges and inputs to mitigate that

• NLP & other analytical models for converting raw data into structured information, and insights generated from these comprehensive unstructured data sets as above

• Text Analytics to come up with Infant nutrition aligned 'Sentiment Analysis'

• Identifying brands and correlation from text scraped from the web. e.g. of brands can be Beech-Nut and Del Monte Foods etc

 

Here are some examples of data source types that you can use (but the list is by no means exhaustive and you’re not limited to items on the list)

• Customer data - Product reviews, social media, discussion boards, blogs

• Sales - online, retail

• Product - label data, product launches

• Technology - Clinical trials, global patents, research papers, grants

• Events - Conferences, Business news, funding

• Influencer & KOL activities

 

Checkpoint submission

Since this is an open-ended challenge, we have a checkpoint submission deadline on Jan 28th 9 AM EST. Checkpoint submissions will be reviewed by the client and you will receive the review feedback. Submitting for the checkpoint deadline is optional, and you can still submit the final submission without it. There are 4 checkpoint prizes of $150 to the top 4 checkpoint submissions.

Submission Contents

The final submission should be a report, more like a technical paper. It should include, but not limited to, the following contents. The client will judge the feasibility and the quality of your proposed approach.

1. Title: Title of your idea

2. Abstract / Description: High-level overview/statement of your idea

   • Outline of your proposed approach - types of data sources and expected insights

   • Outline of the data sources you have considered and their pros and cons

   • Justify your final choice - the data sources that should be used

3. Details : 

   • Detailed description. You must provide details of each step and details of how it should be implemented

     • Which data sources to use and how to combine them

     • Insights that would be generated using those data sources

     • Reasonings behind the feasibility of your idea

4. Appendix(optional) : 

   • Bibliography, A reference to the paper, data sources, etc.

 

Format

• A document should be a minimum of 3 pages in PDF / Word format to describe your ideas.

• It should be written in English.

• Leveraging charts, diagrams, and tables to explain your ideas is encouraged from a comprehensive perspective.

 

Judging Criteria

You will be judged on the quality of your ideas, the quality of your description of the ideas, and how much benefit it can provide to the client. The winner will be chosen by the most logical and convincing reasoning as to how and why the idea presented will meet the objective. Note that, this contest will be judged subjectively by the client and Topcoder. 

Final Submission Guidelines

See above