Here's the simple truth: you have more important things to worry about than becoming a competition expert. Download this free PDF to learn five ways that we can help you save time and money.
Common Pool is now Carrot Read More
Activate your cause and build a community of applicants to advance your mission.
Your hub for innovation and crowdsourcing solutions to serious business problems.
When you're confronted with a complex problem, engaging new talent accelerates results and separates you from the pack.
You define success, and others are rewarded once they've met your standards - the outcome is more efficient than traditional approaches.
Everyone loves a competition - you only pay for results, but you mobilize new audiences that are eager to understand and meet your needs.
We have worked hand-in-hand with our trusted partner Carrot on all of our competitions, from $10 million to $100 million, covering topics from racial and gender equity to economic development and climate change. Our teams have worked together to create a large-scale award process that provides seamless experiences for clients and applicants alike.
Our clients have relied on us to offer awards from $50 to $100 million - we help you calibrate the right incentives.
We will guide you through avoiding the common pitfalls of running a successful competition.
In over a decade, we have never failed to meet the objectives of any competition.
We've registered a community of over 170,000 applicants across all of our competitions.
We have registered individuals from almost every country on the planet over our 10 year history.
Carrot helped us design, develop, and manage a global competition to engage front-line healthcare workers. Together, we built an online community that proposed creative new models of intervention around the world. From start to finish, the Carrot team guided us through the process.
The platform that Carrot designed and built for us supported over 2,000 registrations with more than 22,000 individuals from 174 countries. We couldn’t be happier with the support and service we’ve received.
Carrot's team is professional, friendly, and always available to provide necessary guidance. They created an exciting competition that sparked new and innovative projects for economic development in our City.
Carrot is a service business. We provide you with custom programs, tailored to ensure the success of your investment strategies. From start to finish, we are your guide for launching and managing any competition.
We will design, brand, build, and manage a dedicated website for each program. Your website will contain the specific requirements for participation and the legal conditions to protect your interests. As a targeted audience of applicants registers and submits their proposals, you own that content. You define the outcome, and others compete to meet your expectations.
By embracing an open, transparent, and fair approach to your investment needs, our clients have realized faster and more cost-effective results. Rather than relying upon the talents or technologies of a limited set of providers, we help you tap into a broader pool of talent, but you only pay for success.
Carrot works with large and small organizations. We charge on a fixed-fee basis with multiple tiers of services and with optional packages of features.
Unlike other firms, we do not charge as a percentage of your award(s) nor do we price our services against the capacity of your budget. As a certified vendor to US federal and other highly regulated clients, we are required to maintain consistency in our pricing.
Every client has a different set of needs. At Carrot we will design your competition, brand it, build it, and run it for you. Our approach ensures that each program is customized for your intended outcome. This means that our clients often meet with us on a weekly or bi-weekly basis during the initial stages of program design, and then on a less regular basis during each active competition phase. We have clients that have dedicated as few as 2-3 staff and others that have empaneled multiple stakeholder parties and key partners. We will work with you to assume as much of the responsibility as you need or want.
Any time you need others to compete for your resources or attention, competitions are more efficient and effective than other approaches.
Solving problems requires investment. Once you are ready to find the right team or technology to meet your needs, sourcing those opportunities is always a challenge. By sponsoring a competition, you are merely replacing traditional models, like RFPs or other procurement methods, with a more open, transparent, and fair platform. By expanding the aperture, you will find new and exciting solutions.
From the start of any client engagement to launch, it takes between 3-5 months to design and develop your competition. During that process, we will recommend specific phases of submission and assessment, to ensure that you are attracting top performers and that their proposals are scored as precisely as possible. Depending upon the number and type of each phase, the actual competition may take between 6-12 months. We can work with you to determine what length works best for your program.
You own the assets. This is an important aspect of our services. As individuals, organizations, and/or teams register to compete, that data is yours. Similarly, we will work with you to establish ownership of any intellectual property submitted through your competition. Our ambition is to provide you with the concepts and the assessment data, so that you can select the best solution(s) to meet you needs, but we also see value in the full range of proposals. You get to pick the winning solution(s), but you also gain a more complete understanding of the many other technical approaches that may change your perspective or shift your strategic approach to implementation.
Over the past two decades, the use of prizes, challenge competitions, and fellowship programs has grown at a pace of ~18% per year. Today, corporations, foundations, and government agencies are replacing RFPs and other forms of procurement with prizes. So, it is not unusual for us to work with clients who have started a program only to find that the structural and operational challenges are too great or that scaling it requires expertise. At Carrot, we help our clients realize the potential that inspired them in the first place. We are your guide to improving any program that invites others to compete for your resources.
We want to get to know you and the problem that you need to solve.
A 30 minute consultation will make sure we’re a good fit for each other.
We'll hit the ground running with a kick-off meeting to define your goals.
Here's the simple truth: you have more important things to worry about than becoming a competition expert. Download this free PDF to learn five ways that we can help you save time and money.
