I suspect you took my post way too serious. In real research — as in real life — there is no clear borderline between black and white, known and unknown, possible and impossible. If we all knew answers to our questions in advance — or even knew in advance whether our questions have answers at all — there would be no reason to do research in the first place. There would be no reason, either, to have you or me (in my “scientific” past).

Why are you surprised that the Seekers are using InnoCentive (and thus you, our Solvers) to do what you call “advanced research”? Of course, they are. Otherwise, what is the point of going outside their R&D departments and spending money on “external” sources? Do you really believe that our clients charge us with their easiest problems while keeping the most daunting (”that have no solutions”) for themselves? It’s the other way around! InnoCentive is alive and growing (and growing fast) exactly because time to time — admittedly, less often than I’d like to — we bring to “the DOW’s and P&G’s of the world” solutions to the problems their own researchers have long proclaimed “unsolvable.”

Like it or not, the only way to know whether the problem is “solvable” or “unsolvable” is to try solving it. I’m unaware of other means. Are you?

I’ll hardly disclose any secret by saying that not every InnoCentive challenge gets solved. Well, you know this already from your own record — very successful one — as our Solver. Just compare 4 challenges that you’d solved so far (am I correct here?) with the total number of challenges you worked on. And many of the challenges that you haven’t solved remained unsolved. Is there any need to invoke “corporate games” here? I don’t think so.

InnoCentive IS the new way of doing things. Our clients pay for success, not for try. And, yes, they think big when thinking success. Picking “easy” problems to provide 100% solution rate isn’t my way of defining the latter.

Naturally, I’ll be happy to continue this discussion.

Best Regards,
Eugene

WOW! You are scaring me with this post!!!!

You write: “I know that the Challenge has no solution. And so does the Seeker!”

Are you suggesting here that sometimes the Seekers are simply USING us to do their advanced research with little expectation of ever paying an award?

You write: “No solutions this time? All right, let’s wait for another couple of years.”

This statement implies that we have a very good chance of working for free while the Seeker waits for the technology to catch with our creativity. Ouch! This may not be a problem with altruistic challenges and some Solvers, but will result in lost trust in the fairness of the relationship if allowed to continue by the DOW’s and P&G’s of the world.

You go on to write: Seeker “collected all the submissions, entered his boss’ office and dropped the whole package on his table. His boss has never raised this topic again.”

I sincerely hope the Seeker was kidding. Again, I suspect that we all have better things to do with our time than be an unknowing party to someone’s internal corporate political games. InnoCentive is supposed to be the NEW way of doing things. I am really not interested in being a pawn in the old paradigm and also hope you were appalled by this “story”.

In conclusion…. I don’t know whether to criticize the Seekers, or abandon the Open Source process, or admit a misunderstanding of the intent in the statements above, so I will wait for your explanation.

Tom Kruer
Destroyer of “blue walls” and builder of out-of-the-box mosquito traps