Perspectives on Innovation

Aaron M. Renn, a Solver from Chicago and Indianapolis, recently won the InnoCentive Challenge “Ideas for Increasing Public Transportation Use to Reduce Greenhouse Gases in Chicago”.

I grew up in a small town in rural Indiana. While I love the country, after graduating from Indiana University with a business degree, work carried me off to Chicago where I fell in love with city living. Professionally, I’ve worked mostly in the technology space, but I also developed an interest in urban affairs, including transportation, economic development, branding, the arts, and architecture and design. A couple of years ago I started writing my blog on these issues, The Urbanophile, though I have long been a writer on the subject. I published a very early internet blog about transit in Chicago in the 1990’s.

I was unfamiliar with InnoCentive prior to this Challenge. One of the people who reads my blog actually emailed me information about the Challenge, saying it looked like something I would be interested in. Indeed, I was, and felt I had a lot to contribute to the cause of boosting transit ridership in Chicago. I love Chicago, and my motivation for responding to the Challenge was to help make it an even greater city than it already is.

Find out more about Aaron on his blog The Urbanophile.

For me, “Open” Innovation embodies the notion that here in the new economy, marketplaces are emerging for ideas that will fundamentally challenge the conventional thinking in areas that include ideation, research, product development, collaboration, and even intellectual property.

In this brave new world, we don’t seek to limit the number of minds focused on a problem to a select few, instead we enlist thousands or millions with a passion to make a difference. Diversity of thought and access to vast networks of qualified minds becomes the valuable currency replacing the closed monolithic approaches that literally define our organizations today. This “Open Innovation” reaches outside of the four walls and literally attracts, like a powerful magnet, everyone eager to participate in advancing the cause – solving the problem.

This approach will power rapid change in every segment of the economy:

Businesses will improve product development life cycles, production methods, and even evolve their own business models

Academia, Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and Foundations will harness a tremendous diversity of thinking and focus it toward problems of global impact; and

Governments will enlist thousands or millions of citizens in everything from disaster relief to reinventing government.

Imagine FEMA seeking immediately implementable solutions for housing after Hurricane Katrina; or Los Angeles seeking new approaches to reducing traffic congestion; or a corporation undertaking to design and deliver to market better products designed by scientists, entrepreneurs, and even their existing customers – none of whom may work for them. In this new world, Open Innovation Marketplaces will literally be the clearing houses for connecting myriads of needs to literally millions of creative, inventive, and “uniquely prepared” minds and organizations from all over the world.

At InnoCentive, we are committed to being at the forefront of this change. With a firmly held belief that incentives hold the key to harnessing and focusing the vast collective talent pools available worldwide, we will drive innovation everywhere there is the potential to make a difference. Hence the name: Innovation + Incentive = InnoCentive. (more…)