Perspectives on Innovation

We are pleased to announce that on Thursday, February 25th, 2010, InnoCentive will be launching a new home page. The primary goal of the new home page is to make it easier for you to find Challenges that interest you. As soon as you launch the page you’ll see a listing of all open Challenges, which can be sorted by date, award amount, popularity or subject matter.  We also have selected a few Featured Challenges that we think may be of interest, or you can go directly to the “Challenge Center” to see all open Challenges.  You can also access open Challenges by clicking the “Challenge Center” tab at the top of the page.

To access your “My InnoCentive” page, click the tab on the far right.  In addition, the home page will provide more information about InnoCentive, other Solvers and some of our Innovation partners.  Below is a snapshot of how the page will look:

We hope you like the new look and functionality. This is just the first step in series of website enhancements, and we will keep you posted along the way.

Another exciting advancement this week is the introduction of Solver and Seeker Discussion Forums.  You will have the opportunity to further participate in the InnoCentive community and discuss topics centered around innovation and problem solving.  Only registered InnoCentive users may post comments but all web-site visitors will have access to read the latest topics in these forums.

Last August InnoCentive posted our 3rd annual video Challenge, the “InnoCentive 2010 Video Challenge: Changing the World.”

The theme was “Unlimited Possibilities: InnoCentive Solvers Changing the World”, where we asked our global Solver community to show potential Solvers how they can make a difference and help to change the world.

We had many outstanding and creative submissions, but as is the case with all contests, we had to choose a winner. In this case, InnoCentive chose three winning videos, at award amounts of $7,500 for first place, $1,500 for second place and $1,000 for third place.

Please join us in congratulating the winning Solvers! As promised, we are sharing the videos of the second and third place winners, David Michael and Jason Harper, respectively. Stay tuned for our first place winner, who we will announce next week!

We hope you enjoy these videos as much as we did.

2nd Place 2010 Video Challenge Winner

“When I made my video for InnoCentive, I wanted to concretize the concept ‘innovation’ by pointing to some of the world’s great innovators and problem solvers. InnoCentive embodies the tenacity and ingenuity of those people listed on the rolodex. When you present a problem to the Solvers at InnoCentive, it’s almost like being able to phone one of the history’s greatest innovators.”

- David Michael, 2nd Place winner of the 2010 InnoCentive Video Challenge

3rd Place 2010 Video Challenge Winner

“I know InnoCentive is an international effort, but after watching past competition commercials, I realized that I wanted my video to be less universal in scale than the others. Anyone who knows InnoCentive knows that the company has a fantastically global consciousness, but on the ground level, it’s often a few stellar individuals in lonely rooms at midnight who make the difference and solve problems. Showing that sort of person’s experience was the key to my video.”

-Jason Harper, 3rd Place winner of the 2010 InnoCentive Video Challenge

InnoCentive has recently launched a special initiative to help organizations in the non-profit and public sectors solve a myriad of social problems.

Here’s how it works.  Throughout 2010, InnoCentive will waive its typical posting fee for a single Challenge for selected organizations working to make a difference for the ‘public good’.  As with our traditional Challenges, the organization will identify the Challenge, cover the prize amount and support a media campaign to ensure broad participation.  But InnoCentive will provide its services for free.

‘Public Good’ Challenges get the same access to our diverse Solver community, bringing new thinking and expertise to problems facing communities worldwide.

The Chicago Chamber of Commerce recently completed a ‘Public Good’ Challenge that dramatically increased mass transit ridership.  A U.K.-based non-profit is drafting a Challenge in the education arena.  And we are working with an international medical research foundation on a Challenge focused on childhood disease.  The possibilities are endless.

What’s in it for you?  More Challenges mean more opportunities for our Solvers, and the ‘Public Good’ Challenges represent a whole new range of issues and problems to tackle.

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This article originally appeared on Steve Shapiro’s 24/7 Innovation blog.

A magazine asked me to write a book review of Innovation Tournaments by Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich. The book arrived in the mail yesterday and I immediately turned to the index to see if InnoCentive was listed. Sure enough, we are mentioned in several places in the book.

This got me thinking: Is InnoCentive a tournament?

The word tournament is derived from the French word for “medieval sport” and is now used to describe a wide variety of competitions.

Most competitions/tournaments are quite entertaining.  And by their very nature, there is always a winner.  One could argue that tournaments are “spectacles designed to find a champion.”

Given this widely held point-of-view, using the word tournament as a descriptor of InnoCentive seems to be inaccurate.

The NCAA basketball championships are a tournament.  The “World Series of Poker” is a tournament.  American Idol is a tournament.  With each of these, there is always a winner.  The purpose of the tournament is to find that winner while (usually) providing entertainment value.

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In January we reached out to you asking for you to vote for ASSET India in the JP Morgan/Chase Giving Facebook voting contest. Ray Umashankar, Executive Director of ASSET India, has kindly given us an update on the contest.

My heartfelt thanks to all the InnoCentive solvers voting in both Rounds of the JP Morgan/Chase Giving contest.

It is because of your support that ASSET won $25,000 for being in the top 100 of the vote-getters.

However in Round II, we seriously fell short in the number of fans. The winning charity had a Facebook fan base of 295,000 of which 122,500 voted. Our goal is to increase our fan base to 300,000 for the next competition starting in November 2010 and ASSET needs your help to reach the goal.

Please become a fan of ASSET India Foundation by clicking on the link below and request your friends and family to do the same.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=188234189796&ref=ts#!/group.php?gid=357122095006&ref=ts

Thanks again and best wishes

Ray Umashankar
Executive Director
ASSET India Foundation