The Equal Rating Innovation Challenge is focused on identifying creative new solutions to connect the unconnected. Mozilla seeks to engage entrepreneurs, designers, researchers, and innovators all over the world to propose creative, engaging and scalable ideas that cultivate digital literacy and provide affordable access to the full diversity of the open Internet.
This challenge is designed to spur innovation and Mozilla welcomes proposals that build on local knowledge and expertise. These solutions may range from consumer products and novel mobile services to new business models and infrastructure proposals from all over the globe.
The winning solutions will be awarded $250,000 in funding and Mozilla will provide expert mentorship to bring the solutions to the market.
The $250,000 in prize monies will be split in three categories:
- Best Overall (key metric: scalability).
- Best Overall Runner-up.
- Most Novel Solution (key metric: experimental with potential high reward).
The official submission period will be between 1st November, 2016 to 6th January, 2017. All submissions will be judged by a group of external experts by mid January, 2017.
The selected semifinalists will receive mentorship for their projects before they demo their ideas in early March. The winners will be announced at the end of March 2017.
Important Dates
- 6th October, 2016 - Competition preview.
- 13th October, 2016 - Competition launch.
- 1st November, 2016 - Submissions open.
- 14th November, 2016 - Judges announced.
- 6th January, 2017 (23:59GMT) - Submissions closed: Last day to submit an entry
- 17th January, 2017 - 5 semifinalists announced.
- 18th January - 8th March 2017 - Mentorship: 5 semifinalists will be provided advice and mentorship from Mozilla experts in topics such as policy, business, engineering, and design to hone their concepts.
- 9th March 2017 - Demo Day: 5 semifinalists will take part in a Demo Day to pitch their solutions to the judges. Demo Day will be livestreamed to the website.
- 10th March - 16th March 2017 - Community voting.
- 29th March 2017 - Winners announced.
You can visit the official website for this challenge to get more information. There you will also find the 3 key frameworks that may be useful for building understanding of the different aspects of the challenge.
To be part of this movement of bringing internet access to the everyone, prepare to submit your innovative ideas before the clock starts to tick.
