The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has launched an innovation challenge to crowdsource digital solutions to help its employees collaborate better.

The winner will get $10,000 in seed funding.

ADB organized the Crowdsourcing ADB Expertise Locator Challenge noting the need for better collaboration among its employees as they continue to work virtually amid the pandemic.

With a collaborative employee network, ADB hopes employees and consultants will be able to find experts in a given field, while also improving collaboration between different departments or initiatives. 

With more than 3,000 full-time employees, external contractors, and interns, ADB needs such a network to make it easier for staff to connect. This is especially true given the pandemic, where most operations are done remotely. 

Given such a large workforce, teams and employees spend a considerable amount of time on certain tasks and may not know how to find people with the adequate knowledge and expertise to help them. It may be challenging, for instance, for new hires to connect with colleagues, who are not on their team.

ADB has an existing employee database, but it only details a person’s name and job title. To be more useful, it should also collate information about staff’s past projects, specific skills, and areas of interest.

Areas of interest 

To develop their solution, participants may explore the following functions:

• Automating skills, experience, interest areas, and qualification mapping for ADB employees;
• Personalized recommendations for ADB staff to match their interests and qualifications with projects and initiatives of other employees;
• Alerts and notifications that recommend employees who can contribute to specific topics, problems, and challenges;
• Support to find communities, interest groups, and build networks across the organization;
• A familiar social media experience that allows employees to build networks within various themes and sectors, communities, regional departments, and resident missions;
• Customized user profiles that enable employees to build an online presence and personal brand as a knowledge worker within ADB (this may include project and initiative portfolios or even interests);
• Active engagement like discussions, comments, and social feeds to deliver critical insights and foster debate on relevant issues;
• Incentives for employees who embody knowledge sharing, for example, in the form of shoutouts or posts

The challenge is open to the public as well as ADB staff, consultants, and interns.

Deadline for applications is on 4 August. 

ADB will short-list top 10 solutions in August. Participants who make it to the top 10 will receive mentoring from experts. 

By September, ADB will name four finalists, who will make their final pitches to a panel of judges.

The winner will be announced end-September.