Perspectives on Innovation

Last week Nature wrote an interesting article about crowdsourcing and open innovation, dedicating most of it to InnoCentive Solvers. The article, called Funding: Researching outside the box, discusses the motivations for both Solvers and Seekers to engage in “open innovation” on the InnoCentive.com platform, and the benefits derived by both parties.

Using the InnoCentive platform, organizations – companies, non-profits and government agencies – eager to take advantage of the distributed knowledge in the “wired world” are able to gain access to products, patents and solutions that are outside the confines of their own organizations. They post their pressing business problems – Challenges – on InnoCentive, ready to be solved by the “problem-cracking” individuals looking for opportunities to challenge their problem-solving skills and creativity, earn awards, enhance their confidence and achieve career independence and flexibility.

Top Solvers Yury Bodrov, Mounir Errami and Ahmet Karabulut are profiled, as well as winners Simone Sergi, Chris Wilmer and Grace Kepler. They talk about the Challenges they’ve won, their motivations for participating, and some very interesting observations about the “current state of open innovation” for those who can “think outside of the box.”

As CEO Dwayne Spradlin says, the InnoCentive methodology method “the right people to solve the right problem at the right time.”

A link to the article can be found here.

As we’ve discussed before, we at InnoCentive believe that Challenges and Challenge Driven Innovation (CDI) are transformative, representing a fundamentally better way to manage and distribute work and innovation to achieve unprecedented results. This approach takes maximum advantage of diverse, passionate, creative, and inventive problem solvers from all over the world available “on demand”. Sometimes referred to as Crowdsourcing, Open Innovation, or Prizes, this approach is already being used broadly in the commercial and not for profit (NFP) spaces. And InnoCentive has been working with organizations like NASA to prove out its effectiveness in government.

We partnered with Rockefeller in 2006 and delivered novel approaches to lighting, internet capabilities and malaria control to remote villages. We partnered with the  Global Alliance for Tuberculosis in 2009 and improved the manufacturing processes for pending new therapies. We partnered with NASA in 2010 and provided enhanced abilities to predict and model solar particle storms after 30 years of ongoing efforts. We put forward a Challenge to address the BP oil spill and an InnoCentive Solver who submitted her ideas to both InnoCentive and x-Prize was awarded $1M. (more…)