The Origins and Impact of the Tools Competition: How to Use Competitions to Spur Innovation
One way to facilitate breakthrough innovations is through prize competitions. Seeing that competitions can effectively engage a diverse pool of talent to generate creative solutions, Renaissance Philanthropy is proud to host the Learning Engineering Tools Competition.
To date, this multi-million dollar global ed tech competition has generated over 4,600 proposals for solving steep challenges in teaching and learning. It has awarded $17.5 million to 130 winners across 44 countries. The innovations developed through the competition are projected to impact over 130 million learners. The Tools Competition is building the field as well. Each cycle, 70 percent of applicants are new to the competition.
Tools Competition winner Springboard Collaborative built the Parent-Facing Literacy Screener, powered by speech recognition and AI, to automate literacy assessments | Image provided by Springboard Collaborative.
In an interview with Kumar Garg, President of Renaissance Philanthropy, we find out how the Tools Competition got started and about insights gained across several cycles of the competition.
Tell us about the Tools Competition and how it has supported the development of AI-powered ed tech innovations.
The Tools Competition was founded to fill some of these critical gaps I’ve mentioned. This global competition sources ed tech solutions for some of the biggest challenges in teaching and learning. It’s grounded in learning engineering principles, with the goal of advancing solutions that leverage digital technology, big data, and learning science for continuous research and development across the education field.
Since I created the Tools Competition with the help of The Learning Agency in 2020, we’ve seen the competition grow tremendously, and we’re seeing AI-driven ideas increasingly at the forefront. That’s in large part because of the competition’s design — which emphasizes that all of the applicants have their proposals grounded in a research partnership, are tackling an important problem, and building a tech stack that allows structured experimentation and improvement. Each year, we have seen growing interest in AI among applicants, and we have leaned into that interest with an eye towards building the overall field.
For example, this year the Tools Competition is offering a Dataset Prize to support the generation of datasets for education research and development. As many AI researchers will tell you, training data is often the most important ingredient in applying foundational AI models to particular domains. The datasets that come out of the Tools Competition will help develop AI tools that are reliable, equitable, and that lead to real impact.
What was the impetus to launch the Tools Competition?
The first cycle of the Tools Competition launched in 2020, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which exacerbated learning loss on a global scale — and showcased how little we know about how to deploy educational technology at scale.
I also saw it as an opportunity to reset the debate by moving away from ed tech as a silver bullet, and towards a “continuous improvement” ethos and by building the field of learning engineering. Over the past five years, the Tools Competition has offered seedling capital and a forum for cross-sector collaboration in education, connecting ed tech innovators, researchers, funders, and educators.
What impact has the Tools Competition created?
The Tools Competition has awarded more than $15 million to 130 winners from around the world, and is on track to have the tools supported reach more than 100 million learners.
I’m especially proud of the feedback we get from competitors — not just winners — about how the competition benefited them in sharpening their ideas, recruiting partners, and gaining momentum.
With the help of academic partners, we’ve been able to track how winners harness their awards to grow their reach and impact. Once winners are named, they participate in an impact evaluation process that spans 12 months, monitoring their progress in scaling their tool, achieving adoption milestones and sustainability, and generating evidence of their impact. Based on what we’ve learned from the 2023 cohort, winners have collectively tripled their user base, from about 250,000 users to more than 1,000,000 users since receiving their prizes. The majority, 74 percent, have received additional funding within a year of winning the Tools Competition.
That has all been heartening to witness, but I see the biggest impact in its contribution to building the learning engineering community – all committed to channeling innovation toward problems that often seem unsolvable, while using research partnerships and experimentation infrastructure to improve their strategies over time.
68 percent of 2023 winners secured additional funding totaling more than $7 million in the first 6 months after their prize.
What are some of the key insights you’ve gained from running four cycles of the Tools Competition?
We’ve honed a strong sense of what it takes to design a competition that supports innovators and advances the field as a whole. For example, we’ve found that breaking the competition into phases helps scaffold proposal development. Over the course of three phases, competitors have a chance to move from an initial abstract to a full proposal and pitch, refining their ideas along the way.
We’ve also prioritized embedding targeted supports throughout the process. At each phase, all teams – whether or not they ultimately win – have opportunities to seek feedback and build connections. Post-competition, we’ve seen immense value in helping winners in particular build the infrastructure they need for better monitoring and evaluation.
In terms of competition design, each year, tracks align with areas of need in education. We’ve seen that it’s valuable to include both broad tracks and targeted ones. While broader tracks generate diverse and increased innovation, targeted tracks help us bring in a more specialized audience with expertise in the specific issues we want to solve.
How do you approach recruitment to ensure a strong network of competitors?
We cast a wide net in recruitment, welcoming proposals from around the world and competitors from diverse backgrounds – teaching, ed tech, science, academia. This brings us a rich mix of talent and ideas and also gives us insight into the broader ecosystem. It basically allows us to pulse the field for exciting ideas and new players.
With three prize levels — Catalyst, Growth, and Transform — we’re also able to attract innovations at different stages of development, from early-stage ideas to those that have already achieved scale. We see the largest number of proposals come in at the Catalyst stage; this prize level is critical for spurring out-of-the-box ideas and pushing the field forward.
Over time, we’ve built a fantastic network of past competitors and collaborators, which has made sure our impact doesn’t end with the awards. Communities like the Learning Engineering Google Group create space for innovators in our orbit to exchange ideas and collaborate with each other beyond the competition.
Within the first 6 months after their win, 65 percent of 2024 winning teams reported expanded research partnerships using or publications highlighting their tool. 93 percent say they more highly value implementing learning engineering in their work, now that they have participated in the Tools Competition.
Learn More
The Tools Competition has generated over 4,600 proposals since 2020. Past tracks have spanned broad needs such as Accelerating & Assessing K-12 Learning, specific areas for development such as Instructional Coaching for Early Childhood Education, and challenges such as Facilitating Faster, Better & Cheaper Learning Science Research.
Each year, the competition hosts three prize levels:
Catalyst Prizes ($50k) are critical for introducing high-innovation, early-stage ideas to the field, creating a space for those without a functioning tool or previous venture to propose their idea.
Growth Prizes ($150k) are designed for products that are ready to be refined and scaled.
Transform Prizes ($300k) allow established tools with 10,000 or more users to reach new heights.
Learn more about the Tools Competition and follow updates on its current cycle here. Our Prize Competitions playbook also shares more about the value and characteristics of competitions.
