Welcome


New Yorkers are passionate, creative, and resilient. Now more than ever, we need to put our varied talent and expertise to work to support and protect our vibrant small business community. To that end, we are relaunching Neighborhood Challenge as an open innovation platform to surface common business challenges and crowdsource solutions from technologists.

We aim to:

Connect the public, private, and nonprofit sectors and facilitate their collaboration;
Enhance the near-term recovery and long-term resiliency of small businesses;
Spur open innovation and creative problem-solving;
Pilot solutions at the local level that can be scaled or replicated; and
Foster the innovation ecosystem and tech talent in NYC.


Let's innovate together and make New York stronger.

Active Campaigns

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Storefront Business Campaign

NYC's commercial districts and small storefront businesses are facing severe impacts due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which threatens their survival. What specific challenges do you see your neighborhood commercial district and its small businesses experiencing during this difficult time? And how can we all leverage technology and the innovation community to potentially address them?

Number of Ideas: 45

Popular Ideas

Hyper Local Delivery of Retail &...

Amanda Zenteno

Restaurants lose a tremendous amount of profit utilizing services such as grubhub, seamless and other delivery applic...

Net Votes: 20 Number of Comments: 18
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Technology & Social Media Traini...

Lauren Collins

Many businesses in my districts don't have an online presence which could have helped cushion the blow from the curre...

Net Votes: 18 Number of Comments: 21
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Reopening Challenges in COVID-19...

Brandon Zwagerman

Once businesses are allowed to open in some fashion post-PAUSE, forms of social distancing, testing, contact tracing,...

Net Votes: 15 Number of Comments: 8
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Reopening Restaurants While Main...

Jonathan Hawkins

There will be a significant time period prior to a vaccine/elimination of the virus when businesses are allowed to gr...

Net Votes: 14 Number of Comments: 5
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Popular Topics

retail reopening publicspaces restaurants publicspaces technology restaurants distancing public culture bid online training community placemaking distancing outdoor social ecommerce shopping workforce arts workforce recovery sanitation inventory curb pedestrian activation pedestrians data space safety merchants storefronts local covid19 inventory sanitation businesses safety beautification adapting 125th traffic stores chain hiring on-line cafe