DARPA Solicits New Design Ideas using Crowdsourcing

The Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced recently its partnership with Local Motors, a Wareham-based company to solicit ideas regarding vehicle designs for two different missions; combat reconnaissance and combat delivery and evacuation. The design contest, which is due to end March 10th 2011, will give the grand prize winner $10,000, an amount that is fair for a month’s work with limited time and resources.

The contest, called the Experimental Crowd-derived Combat-support Vehicle (XC2V) Design Challenge, invited  everyone to submit a design, draw over existing designs or simply offer constructive comments for the creators. Aside from the $10,000 cash prize, DARPA’s vehicle design contest will give the winner a hero status in Geekdom. Furthermore, the winner will have the opportunity to get a high-paying engineering job in any of the prestigious companies affiliated with the contest. In addition to receiving a modern and potentially marketable design from the winner, DARPA will also get hundreds of design ideas from the other contestants.

Adaptive Vehicle Make is about more than just building an infantry fighting vehicle; it’s about building a new process and a new set of tools to support that process to allow us to design complex, cyber-electro-mechanical military system much faster.
Lt. Col. Nathan Wiedenman DARPA Deputy Program Manager

Local Motors is an up and coming auto company that is gaining public appreciation because of its unique way of soliciting crowdsourced designs from the public. When enough people place orders and pay by cash, the company will start the building process of the vehicles based on the submitted designs. Using crowdsourcing, which is already taking effect for clothing, fabric, and other product marketing, the company is reaping the benefits of this innovative strategy.