Perspectives on Innovation

With a static kill procedure solution in place on the MC252 well in the Gulf, pressure tests are being performed and results are being reviewed.

Today we’re featuring a solution we received from InnoCentive Solver, Joseph Pegna, which focused on freezing MC252 while it was still blasting oil into the cold waters at the bottom of the Gulf.

The purpose of Pegna’s solution was not to contain the leak from the ocean floor indefinitely, but rather to contain it efficiently until such time as a more permanent plug could be found.

The solution takes advantage of the relatively stable and low temperature of the sea floor to provide a temporary obstruction to the leak by freezing locally available materials: oil and water.

A back-of-the-envelope estimate of leak flow-rates indicates that a few ten’s of cubic meters of liquid Nitrogen would be sufficient to stop the oil in its track. Subsequent freezing of the surrounding water, either by additional liquid N2 or by lowering an industrial refrigeration unit to the ocean floor, would keep an ice plug over the leak.
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We recently posted a Challenge for the LAUNCH initiative, a collaboration among  USAID, Nike, NASA and the U.S. State Department.  This is the second Challenge posed by LAUNCH, but the first posted on InnoCentive.com.  This Challenge is seeking preventive measures to improve the first 20 years of human health via nutrition, exercise and diagnostics.   We asked Dave Ferguson, from the Science and Technology Office at United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to talk to us a bit about this Challenge and the opportunity available for the winning Solvers.

Hi Dave.  Thanks for talking to our Solvers today.

Absolutely – thanks for asking.

Your partnership – USAID, Nike, NASA and the State Department is interesting – can you tell us how this collaboration came about?

If you think about it, there’s a pretty significant benefit to NASA, USAID and the State Department working together to share skills, information and expertise.  NASA, for example, has spent years, decades really, perfecting the art of working in resource constrained environments, through the evolution of manned space flight.  This expertise can be used in all kinds of other situations, to solve to problems in developing countries, or in dealing with natural disasters, just to name a few.    Another example is the extremely sophisticated earth sensing and data analysis capabilities that NASA has developed, which can be used to deal with environmental impacts from natural disasters.   USAID and the State Department have similar expertise to share – and we realized that we are more likely to succeed when we work together.

To round out the partnership, it made sense to bring in an organization from the private sector.  For this Challenge in particular, with its focus on improving health and promoting healthy habits, Nike was a natural fit, because of their focus on viable business models and sustainability.  Nike has always been an environmentally responsible corporation, with a long history of releasing innovative products, therefore they were excited for the opportunity to be part of the collaboration.

What are your objectives in participating in this Challenge? Read the rest of this entry »

InnoCentive@Work has been nominated for a Forrester Groundswell Award!  You can vote for our entry on the Groundswell Submissions Page.  In the meantime, read more about InnoCentive’s enterprise offering below:

Introduced in 2008, InnoCentive@Work is the fast, easy and cost-effective way to harness the collective intellectual power of your best and brightest people. It provides an open forum where everyone in your organization is encouraged to collaborate on your most pressing organizational challenges via a secure, easy-to-use web-based portal. It rewards individuals from anywhere in your company for their contributions toward solving your most pressing problems. And it gives you the ability to unleash breakthrough innovations designed to drive growth and profitability – in less time and for less money than you ever thought possible.

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Condensed from Complexity Digest 2010.17 by Bruce Hannon

Clouds, big data, and smart assets: Ten tech-enabled business trends to watch, McKinsey Quarterly

Excerpt:

Trend 1: Distributed cocreation moves into the mainstream
Trend 2: Making the network the organization
Trend 3: Collaboration at scale
Trend 4: The growing ‘Internet of Things’
Trend 5: Experimentation and big data
Trend 6: Wiring for a sustainable world
Trend 7: Imagining anything as a service
Trend 8: The age of the multisided business model
Trend 9: Innovating from the bottom of the pyramid
Trend 10: Producing public good on the grid

Source : Clouds, big data, and smart assets: Ten tech-enabled business trends to watch, Jacques Bughin, Michael Chui, and James Manyika, McKinsey Quaterly, 2010/08

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Congratulations to InnoCentive Seeker Precyse Technologies.  Their Challenge was recently featured in an article on About.com, reproduced below.

Tech Firm Turns to Crowdsourcing for Technology Solution
By Mitchell York, About.com Guide

When most people think of crowdsourcing, the type of projects that come to mind are often creative but relatively simple things like logo development and web design. What happens when a company has a complex technology problem to solve and turns to the crowd?

Precyse Technologies is a provider of real-time location and supply-chain solutions that help companies track their assets using RFID technology. Its challenge was to improve mobile device performance and battery life. Precyse was looking for a way to “wake up” active RFID tags as they arrive from transit or enter a customer facility-without draining the battery’s energy listening to these wake-up calls. The company did not have the technology resources in house to solve the problem and turned to crowdsourcing site InnoCentive.

Rom Eizenberg, co-founder and CMO of Precyse, gave About.com some insights into the crowdsourcing project.

Did Precyse try to solve the issue another more traditional way first, and then arrive at the crowdsourced solution?

We chose to use crowdsourcing instead of attempting to solve the challenge in-house, as this alternative provided us with shorter time-to-market, excellent access to the best talent around the world and with a stronger ROI and lower development risk.

How did Precyse find out about InnoCentive?

We were introduced to InnoCentive through a mutual investor, Spencer Trask Ventures. We had explored the use of crowedsourcing before on simpler challenges such as graphic design and even participated and nominated a finalist company on a challenge sponsored by the DOT and IBM seeking to identify technologies to reduce traffic congestion with a company called Vencorp. In this sense, we were first solvers and then customers.

How many responses did Precyse get from Innocentive and how did it make a selection?

More than 350 solvers opened project rooms on the InnoCentive web platform. Precyse received more than 300 ideas and we narrowed that down to 3 finalists from whom we chose one winner. We could evaluate each solver’s solution based on the detailed proof and calculations provided by many of the participants. We worked with great engineers from around the world, each offering his or her unique approach to solve the technical challenge we introduced, and our CTO, Michael Braiman, who co-founded Precyse, evaluated the technologies proposed by the solvers to choose the best.

Were there issues of trust in having a solution offered from someone the company had never met and didn’t know? Was there a vetting process?

We had no issues with trust as InnoCentive provides anonymity for the company through the filing process. The vetting process allowed the company to evaluate each individual submission to its full extent, choosing only those which were detailed and supported claims with hard evidence and in our case, mathematical calculations backing assertions.

Did Precyse pick one solver or solution, or several, and how did that affect how much it paid?

We chose only one solution because it was superior to all others, but if we had selected several solutions we would have been required to pay for each solution.

You estimate a cost savings of $250,000. Can you tell me more about where the savings comes from, and what you would have done ordinarily for something like this?

We estimate the savings by calculating the costs associated with assigning a team of engineers to evaluate the problem, performing background research and consequently developing the solution. This process entails management and other overheads, and does not guarantee success as we were after an innovative technology which was not available in the market at start-point. Being able to buy an “option” on IP and pay only if the challenge was solved allowed us not only to save on costs but also to mitigate R&D risk. Of course, the access we got, tapping into the best minds around the world was an intriguing advantage for us. Some of the participants held expertise in the specific areas relating to the solution we sought that we did not necessarily have in-house.

What was the time frame of this project?

It took approximately four months from initial concept with InnoCentive to selecting the best solution.