This is a great initiative ! Thought I'd call out, for the benefit of people here, that IDEO[1] (the largest design consulting company in the world, for those that don't know) had launched OpenIDEO[2] a few years ago with pretty much the same goals -- crowd sourcing solutions to solve ^big^ questions.

They went on further to provide the platform/framework as a service[3] for example with OpenPlanetIdeas[4]

I feel it is a good thing to focus effort in this manner and I hope this sort of thing picks up steam.

If you are interested in this sort of thing, you should definitely check out openideo.com

disclaimer: I worked on openideo for a while and I'm pretty proud about not just the 'work' that I did but what it stood for and what it achieved.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEO
  [2] https://challenges.openideo.com/
  [3] http://oiengine.com/
  [4] https://challenges.openideo.com/blog/congratulating-sony-open-planet-ideas