About us

OmniCompete aims to become the world leader in providing high-quality innovation competitions. Building on its success within the security sector via its flagship competition, Global Security Challenge, OmniCompete has hosted or is currently hosting over 22 international competitions in the areas of security, energy, water, health and cloud computing with over $2.9M in prizes.

We can count both public and private institutions amongst our clients and our innovators have subsequently generated $124M in investment and acquisitions. We aim to empower entrepreneurs working in the high-tech space and each year awards cash prizes to world leading entrepreneurs and researchers. We are in a period of strategic growth that offers excellent opportunities for outstanding individuals.

What makes OmniCompete unique?

Completing our mission and our vision, we believe in three powerful ideas that will transform the way that prize competitions solve problems:

1.  Abstraction   2.  Increments   3.  Measuring our success
The best way to solve complex client problems is to deconstruct the problem and reformulate it in generic language. The language typically used to describe problems often implies the expected solution, limiting the potential for truly original solutions. By stripping problems of sector-specific language to the abstract, we can drive high-levels of participation from innovators outside the problem sector.   Most complex problems cannot be solved in one step. Similarily, the solution to an abstracted problem may not be the final solution to the original, complex problem. Accordingly, we strongly believe in applying an incremental approach to challenges. While the abstracted problem can often be solved in one stage, holding a second and third stage allows innovators to apply, develop and test their solutions, eventually solving the original, complex problem.

 

   Prize competitions are an effective way to foster innovation and solve problems, but how effective are they? We believe in measuring our work, testing our methods and critically examining our successes. In effective, we aim to measure the effectiveness of our prize competitions. We know that for every $1 million we award, over $35 million is generated, but what does this mean for the client, or the original problem? We are working with a group of international partners to develop an objective and neutral monitoring tool that tests the effectiveness of prize competitions as regards other innovation-promoting methods such as grants.

History

  • The idea of OmniCompete and its predecessor company, Global Security Challenge (GSC) was born at London Business School in 2005, where the founders met during their MBAs.
  • In 2010, the company ventured outside the security field and initiated the Energy Storage Challenge and Health division.
  • In 2010, the umbrella company OmniCompete Limited was founded, which aims to become the home of all high-impact competitions worldwide.
  • In 2011, we incorporated the US subsidiary OmniCompete Inc. in the state of Delaware.
  • Since July 2011, we are on GSA Schedule for US government procurement: GS-07F-0638X
Share