Perspectives on Innovation

We recently announced the new Tec^Edge Innovation pavilion, sponsored by the Wright Brothers Institute (WBI) and the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL).  This pavilion offers a great opportunity for our Solvers to work on issues that face the U.S. Air Force, from topics as diverse as locating a hidden shooter to stopping a runaway vehicle and executing more effective humanitarian air drops.  We recently sat down with Bart Barthelmey, Bob Lee, David Shahady and Emily Riley from AFRL and WBI to find out a bit more about their innovation program.

Hello and thanks for being with us today.  We’re very excited that you’ve chosen to work with InnoCentive and our Solver network. Can you tell us a little more about the Wright Brothers Institute and your relationship with the Air Force?

Bart Barthelmey: The Wright Brothers Institute was created as a non-profit 501(c)3 entity in 2003 to enhance the capabilities of both the Air Force organizations at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and advanced technology academic, industry and government organizations in the Dayton, Ohio Region. Over the past eight years, it has grown steadily and now includes the Tec^Edge Innovation and Collaboration Center, the Tec^Works prototyping laboratory, the Tec^Edge Discovery Lab for challenge project teams, the Tec^Edge IDEA Lab collaborative innovation laboratory and the Tec^Edge Technology Transfer capability. Funding for the Wright Brothers Institute comes from the Air Force Research Laboratory, the State of Ohio and regional development organizations. The main activity of the Wright Brothers Institute is to provide environments and enabling support to multidisciplinary teams as they come together in intense collaborations which focus on complex problems and challenges.

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Jose Luis Susa Rincon is the winner of the NESTA Challenge Transforming Parental Engagement in the Way Young People Learn.

I am an Electronic Engineer, with a background in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. My degree as an Electronic Engineer was in Colombia in 2008 from the University: “Escuela Colombiana de Ingeniería Julio Garavito”. I also have a Masters Degree in Engineering from the “Ecole National d’Ingenieurs de Brest” in France (2008) where I worked at Ensta’s Laboratory of Cognitive Robotics and Artificial Intelligence.

Since 2007 I have been working, especially, in robotic research and mobile robots applications, like a “Robot Guard”. Moreover, at the moment I am trying to apply the robotics on the education field in Colombia.

I knew about InnoCentive in 2008, since that moment, it means to me an opportunity to be creative, like an opened door to start my way to change the world. There, I have seen many challenges and I have been interested in some of them; finally my father Jose Felix Susa (Coordinator of the International Institute of high abilities in Latin America and Central America) and me worked together for one, and we won! I have to recognize my father’s work in this Challenge, his experience in Education, Special Talented Children, Intelligence Development and all their invaluable knowledge in these fields made us the best team for achieve this bid.

I always fancied being an inventor, because of that I chose Engineering as my profession: to re-invent the world. I believe in the capacity of innovation in each one of us as a human characteristic, we just need to believe in our ideas, believe that each new idea could make the difference in this world. That’s why I always encourage the people to do something, invent something and make better our environment. I think that everything is possible and I work for become one idea in a fact.

What about me?

Ok, I’m a funny guy, who is always thinking about different stuff and has something to say (at least very often). I like listen to music, go dancing or to the cinema, especially if they have sci-fi movies, I love to travel, and sleep.

I have a good family and we spend good times together in Colombia, where we live by the moment. However, I’m planning go to study abroad the country. I think, like most of people, that we are in this world for one thing: Be Happy. So, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” like the song, therefore I try to do that and living every day as the last day. As a result, I have lots of lovely times with my loved ones.

Well, this is a short description of me. Now you know a little more about me.

Cheers!

Today’s blog post was contributed by Gabriel Eichler, Director of Consulting for InnoCentive.

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Economist Ideas Economy Conference on Innovation at the Haas School of Business in Berkeley California. InnoCentive was the Challenge Sponsor of the event. The audience was filled with an impressively diverse set of business, government and academic leaders all focused, in one form or another, on Innovation. Some of the more recognizable presenters were:

Hal Varian – Chief Economist at Google

Henry Chesbrough – UC Berkeley – Author and Leading Open Innovation Academic

Peter Schwartz – Co-founder and Chairman of Global Business Network

Scott Cook – Founder and Chairman of Intuit

Aneesh Chopra – CTO of the United States Government

Elon Musk – Found of Paypal, Tesla and SpaceX

Jack Dorsey – Founder of Twitter

Dwayne Spradlin – InnoCentive’s CEO

Diversity Prevails was a key theme that emerged from the conference. During his bit onstage, Elon Musk spoke about his development of the Tesla all-electric high-performance automobile and the rockets developed by SpaceX. In the Q&A session that followed, an audience member asked Mr. Musk how it was that he remained so innovative on his various projects simultaneously. Interestingly, it turns out that Mr. Musk credited his innovativeness by the very fact that he was working on the two very different projects at once. He continued to explain that his most creative ideas were the result of cross fertilization between the automotive and the rocket technologies he was developing. For the InnoCentive folks in the audience, this comment was not particularly surprising for us. This statement echoes the same philosophy that we here at InnoCentive hold to be an eternal truth of innovation – diversity of perspective prevails! Our community of Solvers has a seemingly endless resource of innovative ideas because it is so diverse. When we ask Solvers to innovate on problems outside of their core expertise, they’re much more likely to be successful than someone who already works day and night in that domain. That’s why it was a chemist who solved a problem about cleaning up oil and it was a radio engineer who figured out how to predict solar flare events. Diversity wins every time. (more…)

As a service to our Solvers, we occasionally like to provide information about contests and competitions that might be of interest.  Today’s post is about one such worthy competition, sponsored by MassChallenge.

MassChallenge is running a global startup competition and accelerator to catalyze the launch and success of high-growth, high-impact new businesses. Last year, MassChallenge launched on April 14, 2010 and received ~450 entries. Sixteen winners were announced on October 21, 2010 and split $1M in cash awards. Following the 2010 final ceremony, President Obama announced MassChallenge as an initiative of Startup America. Since then, MassChallenge finalists have raised $30M in follow-on financing and created 300 jobs.

The competition is open to anyone in the world, with any new startup, in any industry. Physical activities are based in Massachusetts where innovation resources are highly concentrated. Every entrant receives training, feedback, PR and networking support via expert volunteers from partner organizations. Active focus areas, a curriculum and bootcamp, investor in residence program, alumni in residence program, and expert mentorship make up the accelerator. The very best startups are identified by expert judges to receive cash awards toward launching their businesses along with enhanced PR and privileged access to top investors seeking to place seed capital to work in high-growth firms. MassChallenge is a 501(c)(3) (non-profit) leveraging both public and private funding. Key dates for this year are March 7th (online application goes live) and April 11th (deadline for final submission).

If you have a venture and are looking to make it to the next level I strongly encourage you to apply to the 2011 accelerator. If you have any questions please reach out to the organizers at contact@masschallenge.org or apply online at www.masschallenge.org/enter.