Traditionally, the only way for individuals or teams to compete in a challenge is if they are in the same ChallengeRunner group. While this works fine if all participants work for the same company or are members of the same organization, it becomes problematic when participants are from multiple, disparate groups as in a business vs business challenge. One potential issue is administrator access to participant data and another is determining which group is responsible for all participants.
By using the ChallengeRunner shared challenge feature, an organization can create a challenge and then invite other outside organizations to join. The challenge creator maintains control of the challenge and can invite their own participants as can external organizations. Each organization in the challenge maintains their own teams or individuals and share a common leaderboard. In addition, each organization in the challenge is financially responsible for only their own participants when using the Commercial or Enterprise editions.