Perspectives on Innovation

Bruce Hannon is known to many for his weekly email digest highlighting interesting articles, published in various well regarded complexity sources, that span the gamut from all areas of research and inquiry, from the life sciences to the social sciences. What all the articles have in common is that they celebrate interesting findings, provocative theories, and the complexity of the world. Bruce has graciously agreed to allow InnoCentive to repost his “Complexity” Digest from time to time. Thank you Bruce!

Below, you will find Bruce’s “Complexity” Digest #5, we hope you enjoy. Please let us know your feedback and feel free to respond to the blog posts and share your thoughts and reactions with others.

Catastrophic cascade of failures in interdependent networks, Nature

Excerpt: Complex networks have been studied intensively for a decade, but research still focuses on the limited case of a single, non-interacting network. Modern systems are coupled together and therefore should be modelled as interdependent networks. A fundamental property of interdependent networks is that failure of nodes in one network may lead to failure of dependent nodes in other networks. This may happen recursively and can lead to a cascade of failures.

• Source: Catastrophic cascade of failures in interdependent networks, Sergey V. Buldyrev, Roni Parshani, Gerald Paul, H. Eugene Stanley, Shlomo Havlin, DOI: 10.1038/nature08932, Nature 64, 1025-1028, 2010/04/15

BuRSTS

Excerpt: BuRSTS is a performance in human dynamics, a game of cooperation and prediction, that will gradually unveil the full text of Bursts. In a nutshell, if you register at http://brsts.com, you will be able to adopt one of the 84,245 words of the book. Once you adopt, the words adopted by others will become visible to you — thus as each words finds a parent, the whole book will become visible to the adopters. But if you invite your friends (and please do!) and you are good at predicting hidden content, the book will unveil itself to you well before all words are adopted. We will even send each day free signed copied of Bursts to those with the best scores.
See Also: http://brsts.com

• Source: BuRSTS, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

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Several weeks ago, Leapfactor posted a Challenge seeking ideas for using mobile alerts and approvals within SAP.  Leapfactor would like to provide Solvers who are working on this Challenge with a bit of input that might be helpful when submitting a solution.

The following was originally posted on the SAP Ecosystem blog.

Here’s an update to Leapfactor’s and SAP’s Ideation Challenge:

Three weeks after launch, there are nearly 300 “Project Rooms” tackling this Challenge. Perhaps the real challenge is to NOT find an opportunity for our micro apps!

Last week, we hosted a couple of webinars and we were able to hear live from Solvers who had some great questions.   We wanted to share with you some of the output of those meetings. (more…)

Omar Parve has the distinction of being the first Estonian Solver to have won an InnoCentive Challenge. He was the winner of the “Isomeric Purity” Challenge.

I like such keywords as creativity, courageousness, independent positive personality.

My parents were veterinarians. My mother served as a chief veterinarian (“veterinary inspector”) of a county. I spent the first ten years of my life in a veterinary hospital because the family of the chief veterinarian was given lodging in a villa on the territory of the veterinary hospital. I participated everywhere and in everything, and “knew exactly” what kind of medicine had to be injected to a sick horse, cow or dog… I was allowed to watch all operations and observed how my parents and other experts were discussing diagnosis and making decisions about treatment.

My father had PhD degree in his veterinary field (related to horses) and had strong academic interests. He was always writing in the evenings and on weekends. He has written handbooks, a number of articles and chapters to university textbooks.

This experience I had in my childhood has been an important driving force behind my research interests. These are: medicinal chemistry, drug development, synthesis of active ingredients of medicines of very high stereochemical purity which sometimes allow unexpectedly efficient treatment. And one of the latest of these interests is elucidation of the role of lipases in natural sugar chemistry related to their ability to produce chemically active hydroxyaldehydes via decyclization of less active hemiacetals.

I remember having somewhat unexpectedly found an InnoCentive Challenge Bulletin in my mailbox in 2001. It was interesting reading material and I highly appreciated the free access to challenge details, but, unfortunately, until the end of August, last year, I was not an active solver.

In August 2009 a challenge on stereochemical problems caught my eye – it felt like a personal challenge. The Challenge details seemed attractive because of its clear, direct and honest style. I felt that due to my long-term experience in the field I could offer something useful to the seeker and the people working on this problem. Therefore I proposed my (awarded) solution.

InnoCentive has been a valuable medium, offering information about important problems in my own field of research as well as related fields. I find it inspiring for its multidisciplinary aspect. I feel having received a lot of useful information from InnoCentive and now, hopefully, I have given something back by solving a challenge. I am certainly interested in participating, together with InnoCentive and other solvers, in delivering more innovative solutions in the future.

When it comes to my hobbies, I have to mention the wonderful national parks of Estonia. I am fortunate enough to have a summer-house and some land in the oldest of them, Lahemaa National Park. Together with my classmates, I was one of the first employees of this national park in June 1971 when it was founded. We worked in the forest. Later I participated in restoring old windmills in the park. I absolutely enjoy the free time I spend there together with my family. Especially fantastic are the brown bears (wild) that come in fall to eat plums and apples in our garden. Visitors (other than bears) of Lahemaa may rent horses in several farms to have riding trips in such untouched environment near seashore in 70-100 km from Estonia’s capital of Tallinn.

There is very interesting and artistic idea that is making the rounds around the web called the “The Johnny Cash” project. This is a crowdsourced art project using Johnny Cash’s song and video “Ain’t No Grave” as the blueprint for all the artwork. Contributors select a video frame as a template and, using a custom drawing tool, draw their impression of the singer and song onto that image. The website then amalgamates all the drawings and the final result is a video that is artfully textured with scribbles, scrawls, drawings and text.

The collective drawings play out a moving and ethereal portrait of the Man in Black and his final studio recording. For those who admire Johnny Cash’s music, this is profoundly personal way to share your creativity. This video is a testament not only of Johnny Cash’s enduring musical legacy but the power of imagination, inspiration and technological ingenuity. Each of these frames was created by a stranger, yet, taken together we have a cohesive whole that shares the imagery and themes of music, religion, life and spirituality.

The Johnny Cash Project is deceptively simple: a person doesn’t have to be an artist to use the drawing tool, so anyone can submit a unique piece. In addition, a frame can be selected multiple times, so each image can be rendered in a variety of ways. The system then randomly selects a drawing each time the video is played.

When a creative project like this is crowdsourced, it resonates with people at a global level, encouraging participation and collaboration. The end result is an organic piece of visual technology composed of a global catalog of illustrations and impressions of a musical genius.

We recently announced that InnoCentive and The Economist were forming a partnership to solve some of the most critical problems facing mankind.  To kick off this partnership, InnoCentive founder Alph Bingham was invited to present at The Economist’s Ideas Economy series at the University of California, Berkeley.  The video of his speech has just been published and, as usual, Alph provides a compelling view of open innovation, set in the context of a few individual Solver stories.

Alph points out in his speech that “Some problems are too important to leave to the experts.” and presents some interesting information about where solutions actually come from.  Interesting to note is that, based on research from Harvard professor Karim Lakhani, on average, women are more successful at solving Challenges than men.  He also discusses the current trend toward Solvers creating teams to work together on problems.

Click on the presentation above to hear more from Alph.