Innovate Pasadena is a community organization committed to advancing greater Pasadena as a center of technology and design innovation by promoting collaboration across business and education to attract companies, entrepreneurs, innovators and capital to the broader community.
Earlier this week, Innovate Pasadena launched the Epic Failures Competition, a challenge that aims to showcase video stories of how entrepreneurs learned from failure to ultimately gain success.
Today, Innovate Pasadena published an Innovator Spotlight interview featuring Anil Rathi, Skild's founder and CEO.
Here's an excerpt:
What is Skild’s story?
Several years ago I launched a global competition where Fortune 500 companies like GE, AT&T, Hilton, AmEx asked strategic innovation questions about new products, services and business models to a network of MBA students from 300 universities and 88 countries. Companies were able to get fresh perspectives and students received cash, bragging rights and even job offers.
From there, Skild has become knowledgeable on how to design, streamline and scale these types of competitions using a cloud-based platform to allow any organization to conduct challenges, contests, prizes and award programs.
To date, we’ve run 300 challenges that have awarded over $50 million in prize money. Clients have included the National Science Foundation, CDC, USPTO, MTV, Disney, Shell, accelerators and educational institutions across the globe.
Every company grows over time. How has Skild evolved?
In the beginning, Skild was in “build” mode. Each customer was viewed as an opportunity to build more features and refine the system with the goal of complete self-service. Today, we’ve removed features that bloat the product, pair each customer with a client services manager and focus on reliability and customer service because we know it’s paramount to happy customers.
You can read the full interview here.
