Ben Cohen:

Innovation isn’t the first word that comes to mind when you think about a sanitation department.

But a few years ago, when New York City officials found themselves in the market for a better garbage can, they followed a strategy to spark creativity that has worked for centuries, producing breakthroughs from the oceans to the heavens and everywhere in between.

They started a contest.

By setting a goal and engaging the crowd for help with all sorts of tricky problems—driverless cars, missions to space, trash cans—organizations can find novel solutions in places they never would have looked and from people they never would have asked.

Last week, I wrote about the Vesuvius Challenge, a $1 million competition with the goal of using artificial intelligence and machine learning to read 2,000-year-old papyrus scrolls. I’m still thinking about the way a bunch of students pulled off the seemingly impossible—and not just because using modern technology to crack an ancient mystery is undeniably amazing. It’s also because the success of this contest should inspire a lot more contests.