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The first crew arrived on the International Space Station (ISS) in November of 2000. After decades of hosting space travellers, the particle sensor, a critical piece of technology to measure airborne matter required replacement. Rather than hiring a team of engineers to develop the part, NASA contracted Carrot to host a prize competition for attracting new talent to conceive and test effective and payload-ready devices. As you can imagine, there are few more sensitive and specific instruments than a particle sensor for the ISS. Carrot was tasked with ensuring that the application requirements met both all of the necessary procurement regulations and technical specifications.

In addition, NASA partnered with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), to ensure multiple uses of the resulting solutions. RWJF’s specific interest was to measure air quality in neighborhoods across America, to determine disparities of pollutants and to support communities working to improve public health. The commingling of private and public funds is permitted under federal regulations, but this was the first such partnership ever used under the legal authority of the America COMPETES Act (the enabling legislation for prizes/challenges). Working closely with these two organizations, Carrot received NASA’s Group Achievement Award for our efforts to ensure “outstanding contributions to the Agency’s mission” by managing a wide range of inputs from the partners and their experts.

Following the success of the program, NASA conducted a vendor evaluation of Carrot and determined that $520,200 of savings had been realized by relying on Carrot’s services and platform, as compared to internal costs for NASA to have developed a similar initiative. Further, through Carrot's outreach and engagement plan, the goal of reaching registered teams was 550% over the projected level of participation, and many of those participants - including the awardees - were new to NASA or had not received previous funding from NASA, representing an entirely new community of practice (still available to NASA’s experts) and a broad array of new technical approaches that NASA continues to investigate.