Perspectives on Innovation

In a recent conversation with Melanie Leitner, Chief Scientific Officer of Prize4Life, she mentioned a great new resource that the organization had developed for Solvers - the ALS Forum.  This Forum contains an unbelievable amount of reference information about ALS drug development, links to potential funding sources, networking resources, the latest news on ALS research and more.  In the near future, Prize4Life will add including new databases and demonstration videos.  The Forum was developed in part as a result of suggestions and feedback from InnoCentive Solvers and is an absolutely essential resource for anyone working on the Prize4Life Challenge, or in any area of ALS research.  Check it out!

In the recently published “Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City”, NYU history professor Greg Grandin tells the story of Henry Ford’s failed attempt to transform the Amazon rainforest into a rubber plantation.

In the late 1920s, demand for Henry Ford’s automobiles was booming.  He had control of every natural resource needed to make a car except rubber, which was controlled by a small cartel of rubber tree plantation owners in Asia.  In 1927 Ford purchased a large parcel of land along the Amazon river, determined to create his own rubber plantation and, at the same time, overlay his vision of the perfect American town on the people of Brazil.  He had the forest cleared and sent in American managers who built Cape Cod style shingled houses, wide streets, golf courses, tennis courts and churches, along with the production facilities needed to harvest a rubber crop.  He proudly called his town “Fordlandia”.

Once the town was built, managers and workers set about planting rubber trees, mass-production style, in tight rows, not understanding that rubber trees need much more space in order to grow.  In doing this, he created the perfect conditions for the explosive growth of bugs and blight that feed off rubber.

The integration of Brazilian workers was even less successful.  The clash between Henry Ford’s puritan ideology and the Brazilian workers was epic.  He provided only American style food and “wholesome” entertainment, including square dances and poetry readings.  He tried to enforce prohibition, which was not the law in Brazil.  Workers rebelled - knife fights were common, and bars and brothels sprouted on the outskirts of town.  The situation finally ended in a standoff between the Brazilian workers and the American managers, who only escaped by fleeing into the river in lifeboats and waiting for the Brazilian military to arrive.

Why did the experiment fail?  Ford’s vision for his new enterprise was conceived with a strictly American perspective.  He never considered the cultural differences between American and Brazilian workers.  He didn’t consult with botanists to determine the colony’s agricultural viability.  He installed American managers who knew nothing about growing rubber or about social engineering.  In the 17 years that Fordlandia struggled to survive, he never once visited the site.  All of which resulted in a multi-million dollar investment that did not yield one drop of rubber.  The project was scrapped in 1945.

The ruins of Fordlandia are now a stop on the Amazon rain forest tour - and a graphic reminder of an epic experiment that was doomed from the start.

Today we’re launching the “Question of the Week” series to get your thoughts on a variety of different topics.  If you’re interested in what others think about a specific topic, let us know and we’ll include it.

Last week, the World Health Organization declared swine flu a “pandemic”.  Both traditional and social media venues have been abuzz about the swine flu story for weeks, and have been accused of blowing it out of proportion and causing panic.  Do you think all of the media attention is helpful during times of crisis?  Or does it make problems worse?

Dwayne Spradlin and Alph Bingham, CEO and Founder of InnoCentive, respectively, are in New York this week, speaking at the XPrize’s i2i (incentive2innovate) conference. On Monday, Dwayne and Alph spent some time with Braden Kelley, founder of Business Strategy Innovation, discussing the economics, the potential and the payoff of open innovation, both within a corporate environment and within the non-profit world.  This video, along with Braden’s other coverage of the event, can also be found on Blogging Innovation.

We recently announced that we would be partnering with Nature Publishing Group (NPG) to offer InnoCentive Challenges to NPG readers and clients.  Today we announced a significant milestone in this partnership, the creation of the nature.com Open Innovation pavilion.  I asked Dan Penny, Head of Business Development for NPG to talk to us about the significance of this relationship.

Hi Dan - thanks for being with us today. We’re very excited about partnering with Nature Publishing Group (NPG).  Can you tell us a bit of the history of NPG?

Nature has a long and illustrious history - it was launched in 1869, just ten years after Darwin’s Origin of Species was published - and indeed the first Nature article was written by a strong advocate of Darwin’s theories, Thomas Huxley. It’s great to work somewhere that has that historical context, and although the world has changed a lot in 140 years, we try to make sure that Nature still maintains its important role in drawing attention to the research that shows us how the world works.
Nature Publishing Group - we know it as NPG - now publishes over 70 journals and also offers online databases and services to our scientist community, including daily news and features from Nature News and our careers service NatureJobs. We’re very excited that just this year, Scientific American became the heart of NPG’s newly-formed consumer media division, meeting the needs of the general public.

Can you tell us why NPG was interested in a partnership with InnoCentive?

NPG is recognised as a company which believes very strongly in being innovative in its own right. I used to work for a consultancy which frequently made mention of NPG’s innovative character, but you have to work here to really see how much innovation is going on. It goes back a long way though - NPG’s original, 140-year-old mission statement talks about providing scientists with the opportunity of discussing “the various Scientific questions which arise from time to time”, and so we’ve developed several innovative services to help our readers do that - including Nature Network, our online networking platform for scientists and Connotea, a file sharing resource which won an award for publishing innovation. So I guess our interest in InnoCentive starts with its potential to nurture innovation.

What do you think is the benefit of the partnership to both the Nature user community and the InnoCentive Solver base?

The NPG partnership with InnoCentive will give our user community the opportunity to exercise their knowledge and expertise in solving problems which are out there, but which have stayed private until now. All scientists would like to see practical uses for their research - InnoCentive provides a greater opportunity for that to happen. We see provision of Challenge information to our readers in the same way as our jobs board - providing our readers with opportunities to develop themselves and, who knows, maybe their careers. The existing InnoCentive Solver base should benefit too - I think NPG’s increased involvement with open innovation will encourage others to accept it as a valid way to do research. We all know that traditional culture can be deeply embedded at large corporations - but hopefully Nature’s activities here will make some companies take notice. Read the rest of this entry »