Inside the Walls: How NASA and Airbus Use Internal Competitions to Turn Ideas into Flight Hardware
In order to develop disruptive concepts and accelerate innovation uptake within the organisation, Airbus set up in-house innovation hubs such as “ProtoSpace” and “BizLab” that empower intrapreneurs with state-of-the-art digital and collaboration tools, and promote friendly internal competition.
Credit: Airbus
Learning from startups by systematising “friendly rivalry” so big organisations innovate at operational speed
With NewSpace startups innovating disruptive technologies regularly, large space organisations can no longer leave innovation to chance; they need to choreograph it. Two of the clearest organisation playbooks are NASA’s internal challenge ecosystem (NASA@WORK, NASA Spark, CoECI) and Airbus’s intrapreneurship tracks (ProtoSpace, BizLab → Airbus Scale). Both create structured, measurable competition for ideas and prototypes—in theory without chaos—and both convert winning concepts into programmes that matter to missions and customers.
At NASA, the Centre of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI) runs an integrated prizes, challenges, and crowdsourcing portfolio. Crucially, this includes internal competitions—NASA@WORK and NASA Spark—that invite employees across centres to solve mission problems through time-boxed challenges and peer review. NASA describes CoECI’s role explicitly: a challenge-based approach that increases creative capacity across the Agency and other federal bodies. NASA Spark is positioned as an agency-wide platform for sharing knowledge and advancing projects; it’s the inside-the-firewall counterpart to public challenges. A U.S. Digital.gov webinar details how NASA@WORK runs internal idea competitions and how challenge design turns broad technical needs into solvable briefs—evidence that this is an operating system, not a one-off. NASA’s own podcasts and publications reinforce the point: crowdsourcing and prize mechanics, when well designed, reduce cost and accelerate delivery for real programme needs.
Airbus has built a complementary model. ProtoSpace facilities are “makerspaces with governance”: curated tools, coaches and review boards that help teams prototype fast and de-risk early within security and safety constraints. ProtoSpace exists precisely to “accelerate the pace of innovation” and develop disruptive concepts—an internal arena where ideas must compete against each other (and a gate process) to earn resources.
On the venture-building side, Airbus BizLab ran multi-site accelerators for startups and Airbus intrapreneurs, selecting cohorts via competitive calls and advancing those that cleared milestones; in 2021 Airbus consolidated this landscape into Airbus Scale, which unifies corporate innovation, startup engagement and company building. The direction of travel: fewer silos, clearer gates, stronger conversion to products and businesses. Airbus’s Central Innovation page states it plainly—intrapreneurship is core culture—and spells out how internal entrepreneurs are supported from concept to viable product when ideas align with strategy.
What makes these systems work to promote innovate uptake is competition with a safety case. NASA’s platforms publish the briefs, timelines and selection criteria, then reward evidence—mock-ups, analyses, demos—over memos, with CoECI acting as a neutral facilitator. Airbus’s tracks do the same: ProtoSpace provides capability; BizLab/Scale filters and funds; Central Innovation ensures the winners meet a product or business test, not just a novelty test. In both organisations, clear gates (problem fit, technical feasibility, safety, value) keep rivalry productive, not political.
Commercially, this approach de-risks portfolio bets. Internal contests surface “unknown knowns”—solutions hiding in other centres or divisions—before money is committed to large external procurements. NASA’s framing of prizes/challenges as a way to bridge institutional expertise with wider ingenuity applies inside the house too: the best ideas often come from adjacent teams who don’t normally sit in the room. Airbus’s accelerators turn that same dynamic into contract-ready artefacts (CAD, interfaces, safety assessments), shortening the path to customer pilots or line-fit options.
For buyers and operators, the outputs are easier to adopt because the competition is tied to mission-relevant metrics. NASA’s challenge briefs map to real tasks; winning entries are shaped for infusion into projects and tech transition pathways, not left as science fair exhibits. Airbus’s ProtoSpace/Scale model bakes in manufacturability and compliance from day one, which is why the survivors tend to be integration-friendly.
What can entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs borrow—especially those heading toward multi-product portfolios?
Run internal “micro-tenders” for ideas. Use a light-touch NASA@WORK style call: one-page problem, four-week window, demo day. Pay for evidence, not essays. Publish the score card to keep it fair and repeatable.
Create a ProtoSpace-like lane with rules. Tooling + coaches + a monthly gate review; small budgets released against safety and value checklists. Make the default outcome “kill or commit,” so you accumulate decisions, not backlog.
Unify accelerators under one “Scale” owner. If you already incubate ideas and partner with startups, consolidate governance so winners see a single path to product—exactly why Airbus formed Airbus Scale.
Tie awards to adoption. NASA’s challenge culture works because winners land in projects. Mirror that by pre-arranging a pilot budget with the receiving team before the contest starts.
The deeper lesson is cultural: competition clarifies judgement. When ideas must face a clock, a spec and a jury, teams write clearer interfaces, test earlier and learn faster. NASA’s internal challenges and Airbus’s intrapreneurship circuits show how to industrialise that discipline inside very large, safety-critical organisations. Do the same—at your scale—and you’ll get more than ideas. You’ll get flight-worthy hardware and software on a timetable that customers and investors can believe.
