Beyond the award: How Loftwork uses open calls to transform how companies innovate

For years, Loftwork has successfully used open calls to help companies discover new possibilities. Through AWRD (“Award”), its online open call platform, Loftwork has connected organizations across industries with outside perspectives, emerging talent, and ideas that lead in genuinely new directions.

Open calls are often discussed from the creator’s perspective: a chance to share work, gain visibility, and unlock new opportunities. But for the companies behind them, the potential runs just as deep. This article explores how Loftwork uses open calls not just to surface great work, but to help companies think differently, find unexpected collaborators, and create new value.

Loftwork’s philosophy of openness predates the company itself. In 1990s Brooklyn, artists and creators opened their studios to the public, building a culture of unexpected encounters and spontaneous collaboration. For CEO Mitsuhiro Suwa, that environment left a lasting mark.

When Loftwork launched in 2000, it carried that spirit into the early internet, a moment when people and ideas that had never crossed paths were suddenly finding each other. Its mission was to circulate creativity. The loftwork.com platform gave creators a place where their work could move freely across borders.

Starting as an online community for illustrators, Loftwork grew steadily, expanding from content for games and T-shirts to large-scale websites and physical spaces built alongside engineers, designers, and architects. Throughout that evolution, open calls remained a constant, as did the commitment to discovering and growing alongside emerging talent.

In 2012, Loftwork opened FabCafe Tokyo, a digital fabrication cafe and creative community hub, and launched the YouFab Global Creative Awards alongside it.

Conceived to raise awareness of digital fabrication and discover new creative talent, YouFab steadily grew into a global platform for cross-industry collaboration. By its fifth edition in 2016, that potential was taking concrete form: grand prize winner and award sponsor Yamaha Corporation entered a co-creation process together, ultimately developing and exhibiting a working prototype.

Through ten editions spanning 2012 to 2021, Loftwork’s decade of operating YouFab generated a deep and growing confidence in open calls as an approach for opening up both creators and companies.

For creators, an open call can be a rare chance to test their ideas on a global stage and gain opportunities that shape what comes next. For companies, it offers a chance to meet people they may never have encountered otherwise and to engage with ideas that sit outside conventional thinking.

That potential has shaped how Loftwork has approached open call projects ever since.

The following case studies show how open calls can address real business challenges, from amplifying a brand message and building identity to sparking entirely new directions. Each reveals a different dimension of what an open call can do.

Organized by Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. and produced by Loftwork, the “Everyday Invention Challenge” was part of “DRIVE MYSELF PROJECT,” a co-creation initiative designed to communicate the company’s brand promise, “Innovation for Excitement.” Recognizing a need to connect more meaningfully with younger audiences and Gen Z in particular, Nissan launched three initiatives to expand genuine affinity for its brand promise: an ideathon, a prototyping session, and an open call. The open call invited submissions inspired by “bricolage,” a concept closely connected to the brand promise, and drew more than 200 entries from 21 countries.

By gathering works that expressed each creator’s unique perspective, the project made visible the many ways the brand promise could be interpreted. It also pointed toward a new model of communication, one in which a corporate message takes root in society through the work of the people it resonates with.

The HAPTIC DESIGN AWARD was organized by the JST ACCEL Embodied Media Project, a research and development support program run by the Japan Science and Technology Agency, with Loftwork serving as planning and operations partner. Japan’s first open call dedicated to works and projects exploring the sense of touch, the award attracted 117 submissions from 20 countries at its second edition in 2017, introducing the possibilities of haptic design as an emerging field to a broad public.

The intent behind the open call was to bring the academic world into contact with new players, including designers and creators, by opening it up to society, and to build genuine momentum around haptic design as a movement. Submissions brought new perspectives into academic research and evolved into broader projects drawing in diverse players and companies, generating further ambition to translate research into real-world applications.

The “Kuse no Aru Award” (roughly, “The Award with Character”) is an open call project developed in collaboration with Maxell, Ltd., inviting unique and forward-looking works that fuse art and technology. Loftwork also produced Maxell’s open innovation hub “Kuse no Aru Studio,” located in Oyamazaki, Kyoto, and the award was conceived as a signature program of the studio. Finalist works were exhibited in a group exhibition held at the studio. 

The open call served a purpose beyond simply activating the studio as an open innovation hub. By creating opportunities for Maxell employees to engage directly with creators, it aimed to catalyze meaningful, long-term shifts in thinking and behavior. The creative perspectives that entered the company through this process helped open up Maxell’s deep B-to-B technology expertise to new possibilities.

In 2025, Pentel Co., Ltd. organized and operated the “Exhibition of 100 ART CRAYON Works” using the AWRD platform, inviting submissions created with the “Art Crayon,” a product co-developed with painter and art YouTuber Harumichi Shibasaki. The project drew 2,300 entries from across Japan, and 100 selected works were exhibited at Hibiya OKUROJI in Tokyo.

The open call did more than showcase the Art Crayon’s appeal. It was also a vehicle for sharing the spirit behind the product’s creation: the belief that adults deserve space to rediscover the joy of drawing freely. During the exhibition at Hibiya OKUROJI, the venue was filled with visitors, including many of the submitters themselves. The 100 works displayed on AWRD, vibrant with color and full of life, brought Pentel’s corporate message “Nurturing the joy of expression” to vivid life.

Across these four cases, open calls did more than surface great work. They shifted how companies think. Submissions were reviewed and recognized by jurors and curators, and for some participants that recognition opened new doors. But for Loftwork, the award is rarely the point.

Where many open calls are built around celebrating excellence, Loftwork designs them for something broader: identifying new value, sparking dialogue, and creating lasting connections.

One model is built around competition. Another begins with a question and leads to co-creation. For Loftwork, the latter is often the more powerful approach. Beyond the call itself, it can create the conditions for new communities to form and for companies and creators to discover one another in meaningful ways.

The challenges companies face today are layered, and solutions rarely come from inside alone. Connecting with perspectives, skills, and creativity from outside the organization can create real momentum for new business, new thinking, and genuine innovation.

Open calls are one way to do that, alongside content, events, and co-creation spaces. But they only work when the concept is strong, the purpose is clear, and the invitation is one that people actually want to respond to.

At its best, an open call does more than gather submissions. It creates unexpected encounters and in a world that is increasingly hard to predict, that may be exactly what companies need most.