Divvy wins Target’s digital design challenge

A social shopping list app called Divvy was chosen from among more than 76 entrants who participated in innovative exercise in crowd-sourced digital development conducted by Target and Fast Company.



The Divvy app was created by a New York-based group that called itself Team Pilot and received a $75,000 prize for their effort. The Divvy app which is designed to improve the group shopping experience by allowing multiple users to update a shopping list in real time while making it easier to split the bill and distribute receipts.



Team Pilot participated in a contest created by Target and Fast Company called Co.Labs & Target Retail Accelerator. The idea was to foster digital innovation in retail by challenging developers to build a new mobile experience for Target. The contest ran from March through April. At that point, seven finalists were selected in May by a panel of industry experts including Target president of multichannel and SVP of enterprise strategy, Matt Mankins, CTO of FastCompany.com, Tom Preston-Werner, CEO of Github, Ruchi Sanghvi, VP of operations for Dropbox and Suhail Doshi, CEO of Mixpanel. The seven finalist teams received $10,000 to build their concepts into functioning prototypes and then in June presented to a panel of Target executives including Carl; Jeff Jones, Target EVP and CMO, Laysha Ward, president of Target community relations and Jason Goldberger, SVP of Target.com and Mobile.



“The Retail Accelerator set out to find fresh and innovative ideas for a new mobile experience for Target, and the developer community absolutely exceeded our expectations,” Carl said. “Selecting a winner wasn’t easy. But Team Pilot’s ability to make group shopping more convenient and seamless for guests made the project stand out above the others.”



According to Co.Labs editor Chris Dannen, “the quality of the entries was extremely competitive - many of these were fully spec'd, fully designed apps with proven technical teams behind them. Still, Divvy blew away the judges with clarity of concept and a highly polished look and feel.”



The Divvy app and the other six finalists were profiled in Fast Company’s Co.Labs vertical available here and Target also feature a Q&A with members of Team Pilot here.