Crowdsourced innovation connects public agencies with people, teams, and communities outside their usual organizational boundaries. NASA and federal program figures show the model operating at several scales: international hackathons, citizen-science projects, prize competitions, and small challenges with measurable savings.
Contents
- International participation and reach
- How NASA’s Space Apps program has grown
- Challenges, prizes, and public-sector participation
- Citizen science data and volunteer activity
- Small challenges and measurable value
- What the federal figures measure
International participation and reach
NASA’s Space Apps Challenge provides one of the clearest recurring measures of crowdsourced innovation at global scale. The 2025 event drew more than 114,000 participants through 551 local events and reached 167 countries and territories. Its winners were selected from more than 11,500 project submissions. These figures come from NASA’s “Space Apps Challenge 2025” and “NASA 2025 Space Apps global winners” sources.
The 2024 event used 485 events and reached 163 countries and territories, according to NASA’s “Space Apps Challenge 2024 global winners.” The 2023 challenge welcomed 57,999 registered participants, reached 152 countries and territories, and produced winning projects from 5,556 submissions, according to NASA’s “Space Apps Challenge 2023 global winners.” The participation figures are not directly interchangeable: 2023 reports registered participants, while 2025 reports participants, and the event and submission measures describe different parts of the program.
| Space Apps reference year | Reported participation or submissions | Events | Countries and territories |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | More than 114,000 participants; more than 11,500 submissions | 551 | 167 |
| 2024 | Not reported in the supplied figure | 485 | 163 |
| 2023 | 57,999 registered participants; 5,556 submissions | Not reported in the supplied figure | 152 |
The program’s earlier figures show a longer operating history. NASA’s “2014 International Space Apps Challenge release” reported more than 8,000 participants at 95 locations around the world, working across nearly 40 challenges. The 2020 Space Apps hackathons had over 26,000 registered participants and covered 23 separate challenges, according to NASA’s “Open Innovation: Boosting NASA Higher, Faster, and Farther.”
NASA also reported a dedicated COVID-19 Challenge that brought together more than 15,000 participants in 2,000 virtual teams across 150 countries. It offered 12 challenges. These are event-specific counts from NASA’s “Open Innovation: Boosting NASA Higher, Faster, and Farther,” and should not be treated as a general estimate of all crowdsourced innovation activity during the pandemic.
How NASA’s Space Apps program has grown
The available Space Apps figures show larger reported participation and broader geographic reach in the later event years, alongside more local events and project submissions. The change from 95 locations in 2014 to 551 local events in 2025 is a change in the reported event measure, not a like-for-like measure of unique physical locations. Similarly, the 2020 and 2023 participation figures use registration language, while the 2025 figure uses participants.
NASA’s 2023 event reached 152 countries and territories. That rose to 163 in 2024 and 167 in 2025, according to NASA’s corresponding global-winners sources. The 2025 total therefore describes a wider reported geographic footprint than the preceding two events. It does not identify how many participants came from each geography.
The submission totals provide another view of participation. The 2023 winning projects came from 5,556 submissions, while the 2025 winners were selected from more than 11,500 project submissions. The supplied figures do not specify whether submission rules, project formats, or selection procedures were identical across those years, so the two totals are best read as event-level indicators rather than a controlled growth rate.
NASA’s broader open-innovation portfolio has supported hundreds of projects over the past two decades, according to “Open Innovation: Boosting NASA Higher, Faster, and Farther.” The same source reports that NASA’s civil servant workforce is about 18,000 employees and that more than 80% of NASA’s funding supports work that is competitively solicited and awarded. The workforce and funding figures describe NASA’s institutional context; they are not counts of crowdsourced participants.
Challenges, prizes, and public-sector participation
Federal crowdsourcing infrastructure includes both public-facing competitions and the people who run them. The “Federal Prize and Citizen Science Authority FY17-18” reported that Challenge.gov featured more than 875 prize competitions and challenges from over 100 federal departments, agencies, and bureaus. Tens of thousands of solvers and innovators participated in Challenge.gov competitions.
The same source reported that Challenge.gov trained more than 2,000 people across the Federal Government. Its federal challenge-manager community of practice had more than 730 current and prospective members. These measures cover program capacity and community membership, rather than the number of completed innovations.
The federal catalog also changed over time. CitizenScience.gov expanded by more than 25% after the Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Act was signed, according to “Federal Prize and Citizen Science Authority FY17-18.” The supplied figure gives the percentage expansion but not the catalog’s starting or ending item count.
Prize design can involve multiple objectives. In federal prize-competition data, the average number of goals per prize rose from 2.8 in FY16 to 4.2 in FY18. In FY17 and FY18, 45.1% of prize competitions co-reported developing technology as a goal. These figures describe reported competition goals, not the percentage of prizes that produced a technology deployment.
NASA’s smaller micro-purchase challenges offer a more bounded example. Across FY17 and FY18, 25 NASA micro-purchase challenges produced 1,514 entries, involved 809 participants, and awarded 35 prizes. The challenges cost just over $50,000 total and generated an estimated $100,000 in savings. The source labels the savings as an estimate, so it should not be read as an audited return.
Citizen science data and volunteer activity
Crowdsourced innovation can produce data as well as ideas or prize submissions. NASA’s GLOBE program recorded approximately 16,489,000 data points across FY17 and FY18, according to “Federal Prize and Citizen Science Authority FY17-18.” Participants could report measurements in more than 70 protocol areas.
The GLOBE participation figures use several time windows. The program had an average of 237 active participants per day, 385 active participants per week, and 596 active participants per month. These are averages for their respective windows, not three groups that should be added together. They also do not establish the total number of unique participants.
The Depth Measurement Project provides a second example. More than 4,000 citizen scientists had engaged with the project since 2011. Approximately 600 citizen scientists participated in FY17, and at least 700 participated in FY18. Since 2011, the project logged more than 10,000 volunteer hours. It recorded 3,755 volunteer hours in FY17 and at least 4,160 volunteer hours in FY18.
| Citizen-science measure | Reported figure | Period or scope |
|---|---|---|
| GLOBE data points | Approximately 16,489,000 | FY17–FY18 |
| GLOBE protocol areas | More than 70 | Program capability |
| GLOBE active participants | 237 daily average; 385 weekly average; 596 monthly average | FY17–FY18 source period |
| Depth Measurement Project participants | More than 4,000 | Since 2011 |
| Depth Measurement Project volunteer hours | More than 10,000 | Since 2011 |
| Depth Measurement Project volunteer hours | 3,755 in FY17; at least 4,160 in FY18 | Fiscal years |
NASA’s other citizen-science examples show that outputs may be specialized. JunoCam citizen scientists processed over 8,000 images, while Stardust@Home citizen scientists found eight interstellar dust grains. Both figures are reported in “Open Innovation: Boosting NASA Higher, Faster, and Farther.” Image processing and physical-grain discoveries are different output types, so they should be interpreted separately.
Small challenges and measurable value
The 25 NASA micro-purchase challenges reported for FY17 and FY18 show how a crowdsourcing program can be evaluated through inputs, participation, awards, and estimated financial value. Together, the challenges recorded 1,514 entries from 809 participants and awarded 35 prizes. Their total cost was just over $50,000, while estimated savings were $100,000.
The source also reported that the 25 challenges averaged about $2,000 per challenge. The reported challenge budgets included $5,290 spent in FY17 and $46,707 spent in FY18. Those fiscal-year budget figures are components of the reported set and are not separate totals for all NASA challenges.
The measurements do not answer every evaluation question. They show entries, participants, prizes, spending, and estimated savings, but the supplied facts do not describe the implementation rate of winning ideas, the time required to realize savings, or the distribution of entries among participants. The most supportable reading is therefore operational: these challenges generated a defined volume of outside contributions within a stated budget and were associated with an estimated savings figure.
What the federal figures measure
Taken together, the NASA and federal statistics cover several distinct dimensions of crowdsourced innovation:
- Reach: Space Apps reached 167 countries and territories in 2025, while the COVID-19 Challenge spanned 150 countries.
- Participation: the 2025 Space Apps Challenge drew more than 114,000 participants, and Challenge.gov competitions involved tens of thousands of solvers and innovators.
- Activity: the 2025 event received more than 11,500 project submissions; the 25 NASA micro-purchase challenges produced 1,514 entries.
- Public capacity: Challenge.gov trained more than 2,000 federal employees and its community of practice had more than 730 current and prospective members.
- Citizen-generated data: GLOBE recorded approximately 16,489,000 data points across FY17 and FY18.
- Effort and value: the Depth Measurement Project logged more than 10,000 volunteer hours since 2011, while the 25 NASA micro-purchase challenges generated estimated savings of $100,000.
These measures are not one universal score. Participants, registrations, entries, submissions, data points, volunteer hours, prizes, and estimated savings each describe a different stage or output of collaborative problem solving. The dates also matter: some figures refer to a single event, some to FY17–FY18, and others to activity since 2011 or over the past two decades. Keeping those scopes visible is essential when comparing crowdsourced innovation statistics across programs.