I didn’t think much about it when I first saw them, but there was an article in The Futurist recently that made me wonder about them again. The article talked about structuring a prize mechanism around them.
What really spurred my thinking was based on some of the posts I’d done recently about gamification and business. From that perspective, I looked at how the challenges were structured -- What was measured and why? Why were the constraints so tight? Was there a clear goal?
Then it made me think about if it is useful for businesses to define their own grand challenges to address. We live in a world of exponential change and potential, where the constraints that we have lived within may no longer exist. We need to start thinking about the opportunities differently.
The concept of having “grand challenges” may not require that they change the entire world. They just require a perspective on a different world. They may not even require they change the whole company. What are some grand challenges for IT going forward? How would you measure them? How would you award addressing them?
The greatest benefit to answering those questions would likely be that you put your vision down on paper in a way that can be quantified. We all know that IT organizations usually respond to that.
