Perspectives on Innovation

Well, we just announced the Top Solvers for 2008 and they are AMAZING!

To qualify as a Top Solver, these Solvers had to win two or more Challenges and/or win $50,000 USD or more in awards. This year’s Top Solvers come from eight countries including India, Austria, Australia, Finland, Romania, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States. Challenges solved in 2008 varied within a range of subjects – from baby cleansers and the protection of crops to viral marketing ideas and the reduction of the spread of malaria.

Our Solvers are some of the world’s smartest, most innovative thinkers and each year there are more Challenges posted that look to find answers to increasingly difficult problems. All of our Solvers, and especially our Top Solvers, prove time and time again that they can rise to the occasion to successfully tackle these issues and make a difference in the world.

Please join me in congratulating the 2008 Top Solvers!

Regards,
Dwayne

CEO InnoCentive

InnoCentive Founder Alph Bingham will be speaking at X-Prize’s i2i Conference in New York next month, along with InnoCentive CEO Dwayne Spradlin.  Alph was invited to guest author a blog post for the conference,  on the topic of his presentation – incentivized competition.  Below is the text of his post.

The use of prize incentives to motivate problem solving is well established. While some debate continues vis-a-vis effectiveness, especially in contrast to more traditional modes of research and discovery, most of that analysis has been from the ‘receiving’ end of the spectrum, that is, by the proposed ‘users’ of the innovation. Less so has ‘effectiveness’ been addressed from the inventor’s or contributor’s perspective.

Perhaps it seems all too obvious. The solvers of such puzzles as the Longitude Problem or a Millennium Problem must surely be motivated to work in exchange for the substantial cash reward; it’s no more complicated than any employment contract. Of course, people do things for lots of reasons. I think, over time, that prize systems have evolved to meet specific NON-CASH interests of the solvers and it would be interesting to see how two systems have developed, characterized by InnoCentive on the one hand and the X-Prize on the other. (more…)

On June 8^th and 9^th The X PRIZE Foundation, in partnership with BT Global Services, the John Templeton Foundation and the United Nations Office for Partnerships, will host incentive2innovate (i2i) – a two-day conference that will put c-suite executives face-to-face with some of the word’s greatest innovators to discuss two powerful yet underutilized tools: open collaboration and incentive prizes. During a series of intimate sessions, attendees will have an opportunity to build relationships with peers and engage in discussions focused on how open collaboration and incentive prize competitions can be leveraged to create new ideas that will benefit an organization’s bottom line.

Dwayne Spradlin, InnoCentive President and Chief Executive Officer, and Alpheus Bingham, Ph.D, InnoCentive Founder and Board of Directors member, are two of the conference’s featured speakers. Others include Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief, Huffington Post; Filippo Passerini, chief information and global services officer, Procter & Gamble; and Dan Tapscott, Author, “Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation.” Dan Tapscott will deliver the opening keynote speech.

Dr. Peter H. Diamandis, chairman and CEO, The X PRIZE Foundation, joins us to share more about the upcoming conference.

Hi Peter.  Thanks for talking with us today.  Can you tell us, what is the goal for the i2i conference?

The X PRIZE Foundation is a recognized leader in bringing about “radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity.” The i2i conference is an extension of our efforts to create such breakthroughs in the business, government and nonprofit worlds. The conference goal is to showcase and drive dialogue around two powerful yet underutilized tools that can create fundamental breakthroughs within an organization’s walls to positively impact their bottom line performance, the economy and the world.

The X PRIZE Foundation, BT and the John Templeton Foundation have seen first-hand how these tools can be used to bring about radical changes for humanity, spur the development and growth of new industries and generate innovative ideas and technologies from individuals across the globe. We want to increase awareness and usage of these tools within the business, government and nonprofit communities to help them improve the pace, cost and quality of innovation. We’ve brought together a dynamic group of innovators who, through a series of breakout sessions, will do exactly that. (more…)

InnoCentive Solver Tom Kruer was featured yesterday in a story on Fox41 News, discussing his winning solution to the SunNight Solar mosquito repellent Challenge.  The piece provides a very interesting insight into one Solver’s story, including his background, some of his other inventions and his motivation to solve Challenges.  

Click the photo to see the full story.  Congratulations, Tom!

On August 29th, 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast becoming the costliest and one of the deadliest natural disasters in United States history. Many remember FEMA, state and local officials nervously struggling with the scale of the disaster while the human suffering and toll was making national and international headlines. In the aftermath, serious questions were raised regarding US preparedness.

Here’s the problem with natural disasters: they are random events and no amount of planning is sufficient. The best conceivable responses manage the impact through effective situational command and coordination of personnel and resources leading up to, during, and especially after the disaster. Proper response and optimal decisioning demands real time access to the information, ideas, and approaches to deal with these highly unpredictable and fluid situations. In New Orleans, FEMA needed every conceivable idea and potential solution for temporary housing, better food distribution, people transport, and flooding containment. The opportunity costs of ideas not surfaced or considered early in these emergency situations could be substantial. The current pandemic threat should serve as a vivid reminder that we need conventional and unconventional thinking to respond to challenges ahead.

The rapid evolution of communications, crowdsourcing, and social networking technologies has created an extraordinary opportunity to significantly advance the tools available to organizations that engage in the most serious of these disasters. FEMA, Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO), Red Cross and others needs to pay particular attention to the potential of these technologies to significantly improve the effectiveness of response efforts.

Many storied examples already exist like users “Twittering” critical information from the front lines of the California wildfires, globalgiving.org quickly raising and routing donations for reconstruction of clinics after natural disasters, and online communities self organizing to fill vital communications needs in times of emergency. A few days ago, InnoCentive posted a Challenge to quickly identify whether airport passenger screening can be enhanced to detect contagions, clearly a response to H1N1 Influenza pandemic concerns.

InnoCentive is committed to making its InnoCentive.com crowdsourcing capability and access to its 175,000 strong Global Solver Community available “on demand” to work with disaster response agencies. Coupled with other Web 2.0 providers, FEMA and other organizations could have instantaneous access to hundreds of thousands of virtual responders, including scientists, engineers, healthcare professionals, and others … all ready, willing, and able to lend much needed support.

These systems could be “hard wired” for use by selected agencies and organizations in times of natural or manmade disaster, dramatically improving response effectiveness. This Emergency Response 2.0 Toolkit should be developed and orchestrated BEFORE the next natural disaster.

We call on FEMA and other agencies to survey the landscape of communication, crowdsourcing, and social networking tools available and to put in place the strategies, linkages, and training necessary to immediately leverage these capabilities in times of need. Let’s not wait until next Hurricane Katrina, Tsunami, Earthquake, or Global Pandemic to recognize the ability of people everywhere to have an extraordinarily positive impact in these Emergency Response situations.

Dwayne Spradlin
CEO, InnoCentive