Bringing Technology Builders and Users Together: What the Innovation Challenge Is Really About
The CoRE Stack Innovation Challenge was created to address a recurring gap in the digital public goods ecosystem, where tools are often built by technologists working in isolation, while practitioners who have a deep understanding of the requirements may lack the capacity to translate their needs into working software. The innovation challenge is designed as a shared space, where users articulate real problems and builders explore how those problems can become usable tools, together.
The challenge offered a clear illustration of this approach, with five ideas proposed directly by practitioners and researchers working close to the ground.
Ideas Proposed by the Community
Water Quality Mapping (INREM)
This idea highlights the need to move beyond data and insights related to water availability to begin understanding water quality for water-safe communities. The proposal focuses on building maps to understand where water is safe, and including it in decision support tools for waterbody rejuvenation and groundwater recharge to improve water quality, as well as to use the data to understand how water might be moving in the underlying aquifers.
Reference: proposal on building water quality maps
Lake Ecology Dashboards (Azim Premji University)
Lakes are influenced by multiple ecological and land-use factors, yet this information is often scattered. This idea proposes simple dashboards that bring together ecological indicators on biodiversity from citizen science platforms like eBird and iNat, water presence data from the CoRE stack, and surrounding terrain and water flow information, to support better lake governance and monitoring.
Reference: proposal on dashboards to study the ecology of lakes
Reservoir and Canal Command Area Mapping
This proposal focuses on understanding who benefits from reservoir and canal infrastructure. By mapping command areas, it becomes possible to see where water actually reaches, where it does not, and how distribution inequities emerge.
Reference: proposal on mapping command areas of reservoirs
Greywater Management Tool (Arghyam)
Greywater is a largely invisible part of local water systems. This idea explores tools that could help identify areas where greywater reuse opportunities may exist, and to do site suitability and prioritization assessment in a standard manner for village-level water planning, especially in water-stressed contexts.
Reference: proposal on building a greywater management tool
Protected Areas Tracker (IIT Bombay & Kalpavriksh)
This idea proposes a tracker that brings together spatial boundaries, ecological indicators, and threats affecting protected areas, enabling clearer monitoring and more informed conservation discussions. A quick first version has already been created!
Reference: Tracker for protected areas
What These Ideas Reveal
While each idea addresses a different domain - water quality, ecology, infrastructure, reuse, or conservation - they share a common origin. All five come from users who are close to the problem, who understand where existing tools fall short. They are not polished product proposals. They are signals of unmet needs.
The Role of the Innovation Challenge
The Innovation Challenge is not positioned as a solution marketplace. Instead, it is meant to function as a bridge:
- A place where users can propose ideas without having to build out the solution themselves, and
- A place where builders can engage with real, grounded problems, rather than abstract use cases.
In this setup, users are encouraged to continue bringing forward ideas rooted in their work, and builders are encouraged to pick up these ideas, question them, prototype them, and shape them collaboratively.
An Ongoing Process, Not a One-Time Exercise
The five ideas from the innovation challenge are an early snapshot of what this collaboration can look like. The intention is not to close the list, but to keep it growing, through continued participation from both users and builders.
The strength of the CoRE Stack Innovation Challenge lies in shared problem ownership. By keeping the space open for ideas and contributions, the challenge aims to support the co-creation of digital public goods that are not only technically sound, but also deeply relevant to the contexts they are meant to serve.