This month, we celebrate 15 years of innovation and the people who made it possible.

Looking back over Luminary Labs’ 15-year history, much has changed, but the throughlines are clear. Our team is smart, kind, and inspiring. Luminaries are connectors and conveners, understanding that the best ideas often emerge from new encounters and unexpected places. This includes our clients and broader network –– we are grateful for the people who have shared their time and expertise to address the world’s thorniest problems.

In celebration of this crystal anniversary, we’re reflecting on some of our major milestones from our past 15 years. Of course, this selection does not capture all that we’ve done, but it does offer an overview of the range of projects and breadth of impact over Luminary Labs’ 15 years of growth and innovation. We invite you to browse the Lab Report or explore our case study archive for a more comprehensive look at our work. 

2009

After leaving a C-suite job at a venture-backed company in 2005, Sara Holoubek had planned to take some time off. But her love of helping people solve problems led her to what she thought was a stop-gap consulting contract. After four years of providing advisory services, she founded Luminary Labs.

2010

From the beginning, Luminary Labs was known for curating and connecting people to collaborate and generate innovative solutions. With the health tech boom in full swing, we attended the second TEDMED gathering and quickly became known for connecting the dots between the startup ecosystem and health experts. We worked on early wearables and deployed numerous health tech pilots and prototyping programs.

2011

Even before formalizing our open innovation practice, we were committed to openness and new ways of working. We convened 150 innovators at Luminary Labs’ Health | Tech | Food event to explore how technology could address core health issues; we livestreamed the event and openly shared the proposed solutions. A few months later, we met fans of this work at SXSW 2011. It was a memorable year for health tech, as both StartUp Health and Rock Health were launched.

SXSW was also where we hatched the idea for the Data Design Diabetes Challenge, the first prize competition we launched on behalf of Sanofi to identify solutions that would improve experiences or outcomes for people living with diabetes. The winner of that first challenge, Ginger.io burst onto the scene and has since merged with Headspace.   

Eager to share our work with our growing network, we published the first issue of the Lab Report.  

2012

Following the success of our inaugural open innovation challenge, we designed and produced a second Data Design Diabetes Challenge in 2012 and brought open innovation approaches to more clients and projects, including the Janssen Connected Care Challenge and the Alzheimer’s Challenge.  

Public-sector innovators noticed our work and recommended we explore federal contracts. Later that year, Luminary Labs was awarded a GSA Schedule award.

We were also innovating within our own growing organization. Sara wrote about how CEOs can actually take maternity leave: “And yet, as a founding CEO, I discovered an untold benefit of pregnancy: It made my company stronger.”

2013

Luminary Labs welcomed Janna Gilbert as Client Partner, bringing her talents and prior consulting experience to support the company’s ongoing development. Luminary Labs won its first federal contract to design and produce the FDA’s Food Safety Challenge to advance improvements in foodborne pathogen detection.

2014

Luminary Labs was awarded a five-year contract from the U.S. Department of Education to design and produce Ed Prizes, public prize competitions to foster educational excellence and explore emerging technology. 2014 marked the beginning of a lasting relationship with the Department. 

This was also the year that Luminary Labs hosted the first Lab Session, inviting innovation and health leaders to think beyond design and systems thinking to design and systems doing.

2015

At an official White House gathering, First Lady Michelle Obama announced the launch of the Reach Higher Career App Challenge, part of the Ed Prizes series. 

Other highlights of the year included hosting a Demo Day for the FDA Food Safety Challenge, helping Humanity United address labor trafficking in global supply chains through Rethink Supply Chains, and winning our first NASA contract. 

In 2015, Luminary Labs released Version 1.0 of the Human Company Playbook, a crowdsourced playbook for human company design, a management approach that creates value by investing in people. We shared our experience with designing human companies.

2016

The CTE Makeover Challenge inspired more than 600 high schools across the country to design makerspaces. The winners unveiled their new spaces and shared their learnings at a World Maker Faire in New York City.

We produced the Mood Challenge to identify opportunities to leverage Apple’s ResearchKit to further our understanding of mood and how it relates to our daily lives, health, and well-being through mobile device data.

2017

In 2017, voice-enabled technology was beginning to transform the way we live, as smart speaker devices from major companies like Amazon and Google gained popularity. The Alexa Diabetes Challenge asked innovators how voice-enabled solutions could shift from managing playlists to managing chronic disease.

We also produced the Hidden Signals Challenge to develop concepts for novel uses of nontraditional data that could identify biothreats in real time.

2018

Luminary Labs designed its first open innovation program offering a prize purse larger than $1 million — Opioid Detection Challenge. The $1.55 million challenge called upon innovators to submit novel plans for rapid, nonintrusive detection tools that could help find illicit opioids in international mail. 

We also helped the U.S. Coast Guard save lives through the Ready for Rescue Challenge. The $255,000 prize competition sought cost-effective boater safety solutions that would make rescuing people in open waters easier.

We connected with more than 100 open innovation leaders to produce the inaugural State of Open Innovation report. 

2019

We launched MagQuest on behalf of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. The multimillion-dollar competition continues to advance how we measure Earth’s magnetic field.   

Building on our experience designing virtual accelerators and expertise in open innovation, we launched the Tool Foundry accelerator, a Luminary Labs initiative supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and Schmidt Futures, to advance accessible tools for scientific discovery.

2020

Like many people and organizations around the world, we rapidly mobilized to support efforts addressing the coronavirus pandemic. CovidX, a Luminary Labs initiative made possible by funding from Schmidt Futures, published a daily newsletter and tracked hundreds of rapid-response open innovation initiatives. 

Luminary Labs continued to advance important projects, including two Kidney prizes on behalf of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Kidney Innovation Accelerator (KidneyX): the Artificial Kidney Prize and the COVID-19 Kidney Care Challenge.

As a way to share moments of connection and joy, we produced our first cookbook, which we shared with our clients and extended network.

2021

Building off the first five years of Ed Prizes, Luminary Labs was awarded a five-year ED ARPA contract by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education (OCTAE)

The Neuromod Prize helped the National Institutes of Health use open innovation to advance bioelectronic medicine; the $9.8 million competition continues to accelerate the development of targeted neuromodulation therapies. 

2022

We formally introduced four focus areas: the future of health, the future of work and education, infrastructure, and scientific discovery. 

On behalf of the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, we launched the LymeX Diagnostics Prize, a $10+ million competition to accelerate the development of Lyme disease diagnostics.

We also launched Mission Daybreak, a $20 million grand challenge to reduce Veteran suicides. One of the largest prizes in federal history brought attention and visibility to a top clinical priority for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. 

2023

We worked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to design and produce the Lead Detect Prize, a $1 million challenge to enhance testing for lead in children. At the end of 2023, we announced a $100 million partnership with BARDA to improve vaccine technologies through prize competitions; the $50 million Patch Forward Prize, among the largest incentive prizes in the history of the federal government, launched in early 2024. 

The second State of Open Innovation report offered fresh insights into collaboration, outcomes, and investment in open innovation. 

2024

By 2024, Luminary Labs approached a new horizon of company growth. In February, we introduced a partnership model to support continued growth and expansion, naming Janna Gilbert as partner.

To date, Luminary Labs has been tasked with designing and producing open innovation programs on behalf of public, private, and nonprofit organizations, representing more than $350 million in potential cash incentives for accelerating effective, scalable solutions.

This year, our growing climate portfolio included the AI for Climate and Nature Grand Challenge (Bezos Earth Fund), the Power Your Future Challenge (U.S. Department of Education), and the KidneyX Sustainability Prize (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services). At Climate Week NYC, we convened leaders from across sectors to confront the challenge — and opportunities — we will face in a changing climate.