📋 Quick facts
Two days. Two hundred innovators. One spotlight. Day 1 is for everyone; Day 2 is a private finale for the top seven.
Date & Venue
📅 Oct 25 (10 AM–5 PM) & Oct 26 (10 AM–2 PM)
Racquet Club of Philadelphia
Cost
💸 $20 pass
🍻 +$20 Happy‑Hour wristband
Capacity
👥 200 participants → 7 finalists
Dress code
🕴️ Smart casual (details)
🗓️ Weekend Flow
Sat 10 AM–5 PM Ideation sprint & landing‑page build
Sat 5 PM–7 PM Happy‑Hour with open bar 🍻
Sun 10 AM–2 PM Finalist pitches (invite‑only)
Sun 5 PM Winners Announced
2024 sold out – snag your ticket while you can!
🏆 Tournament Prizes
AWS Activate Program: Invite-only call with the AWS team offering up to $100,000 in cloud credits to scale your innovation.
Seed Investment: Accelerated $25,000 funding pathway with venture partners for qualifying startups.
NextFab Ventures: For greentech/hardware teams, additional product development support and placement in their Venture Studio.
Investor Connections: Direct introductions to Philadelphia's top VCs and angel investors.
Founder Network: Membership in our community of past winners and finalists.
Past participants have formed lasting connections with co-founders and investors during the tournament weekend.
🚀 How to Win
Five moves the champs used last year — tap to expand. 🎥 5‑min guide
Idea Storm 🌩️ — Quantity → quality
- Break every constraint, mash random industries.
- Capture 100 ideas in 10 min, keep three.
- Use domain mapping to explore all angles and approaches.
- Combine concepts from different fields for novel solutions.
Synthetic Feedback 🗣️ — AI focus group
- Role‑play customers & regulators; surface objections instantly.
- Create detailed user personas and have AI respond as those users.
- Generate likely objections from different stakeholder groups.
- Identify unusual use cases or extreme user scenarios.
Prototyping ⚡ — Make a landing page in minutes
For an example of what can be done with almost no effort see our sample landing page and how it was made by Manus with two prompts → see the full process here.
- Generate UI mockups, product visualizations, and branding elements.
- Develop marketing copy, documentation, and user guides.
- Create code snippets or entire proof-of-concept applications.
Stress‑Test 🛡️ — Debate to improve
- Ask AI to be competitor, skeptic, and regulator—patch every hole.
- Have AI evaluate your concept against potential competitors.
- Identify technical, operational, or market barriers.
- Use AI to highlight potential compliance issues.
Nail the Narrative 🎤 — Pitch like a trailer
- Problem → aha → impact. Rehearse Q&A with ChatGPT as the grumpiest investor.
- Have AI help craft a compelling story around your innovation.
- Generate professional slides and visual aids.
- Practice with AI by simulating judge questions.
Recommended AI Toolkit 🔧
- 📱 Smartphone.
- 🤖 Frontier AI: ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, Gemini Advanced, Mistral Le Chat Pro and/or Deepseek.
- 🛠️ Agentic AI: Manus for research and quick landing pages.
We highly recommend using the paid tiers of these tools for access to the most advanced models and features.
🏢 Competition Categories
While you can pitch ideas in any area, these categories are more likely to receive support and funding in Philadelphia's ecosystem:
🤝 Our Sponsors
Note: This list will be updated as sponsorships are confirmed for 2025
Founding Sponsors
Innovation Partners
📊 2024 Highlights
📎 Other Resources
"Our goal is to accelerate Philadelphia's growth by spotlighting and empowering the city's most promising innovators."
The Philadelphia Open Innovation Tournament is inspired by the framework developed by Profs. Karl Ulrich and Christian Terwiesch at UPenn. It brings together diverse minds to solve real-world challenges through friendly competition.
Join us in this exhilarating journey of innovation and impact. Be part of shaping Philadelphia's future!