Challenge Seeks Cost-Effective Fleet Vehicle Data Capture

(A. Kotok)

A challenge at InnoCentive seeks a more cost-effective way of capturing data from a large fleet of vehicles with little, if any, intervention by the drivers. The competition has a prize of $25,000 and requires a written proposal. The deadline for entries is 28 September 2011.

InnoCentive in Waltham, Massachusetts is a company the conducts open-innovation crowd-sourcing competitions for corporate and organization sponsors. The sponsor of this challenge is not identified.

For this challenge, the sponsor — that maintains a large fleet of vehicles — wants to capture performance and diagnostic data as the vehicles are driven. Current devices and systems that use the vehicles’ on-board diagnostics ports are expensive and many require subscriptions to services that charge high monthly fees.

For a large fleet of vehicles, these conditions are unacceptable. The sponsor, therefore, would like a solution that can report data such as acceleration, mileage, and time, but in a scalable and cost-effective manner.

Proposals submitted to InnoCentive will be reviewed by the sponsor. Winning entries will be required to transfer exclusive intellectual property rights for the solution to the sponsor.

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