When we launched the LinkedIn Economic Graph Challenge back in October, our goal was to work with the best researchers across the U.S. to help solve some of the world’s most pressing issues of our time, using LinkedIn data.

What happened next far exceeded all our expectations. We were blown away by the quality and quantity of submissions, and were excited by the strong desire of the community to address some of the most pressing economic issues of our times.

As we started to evaluate hundreds of submissions, it was obvious that we needed to increase the number of submissions we’d accept from our original goal to have three winning teams. Once we determined those that met our criteria, we evaluated them based on novelty, impact and feasibility. We were so impressed by those that remained, we accepted almost four times as many proposals as we had originally planned.

In the end, we selected 11 finalists to work with us. Each team submitted a compelling proposal to utilize LinkedIn data to create economic opportunity. These teams - the majority of which are comprised of students and professors from prestigious universities - aim to solve problems as diverse as closing employee skill gaps, achieving municipal economic improvements and relieving inequality in the labor market. Their results could potentially positively impact millions of people.

Below are the winning teams and their proposals:

LinkedIn is a members first organization, and respecting the privacy and upholding the security of our member’s data is something we take very seriously. As such, we planned the Challenge with our members’ privacy and security in mind. Each team will go through our security training and work on LinkedIn-issued laptops on the LinkedIn network within a monitored sandbox environment. A LinkedIn employee collaborator will supervise all access to and use of select data from LinkedIn. The research will never involve experiments on LinkedIn.

We’re aiming to have final results of each team’s research complete by the end of this year, at which point they will present findings to a select group of LinkedIn employees. We’re excited to see what these impressive thinkers will achieve, and will appropriately share the results publicly when the research is complete.

We’re looking forward to welcoming the winning teams to our Mountain View headquarters tomorrow for a two-day orientation, which will focus on education and include some fun, too. Now, the exciting work begins!

In developing the world’s first Economic Graph, we are realizing LinkedIn’s vision to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce, from a new job to new clients for their business.