Perspectives on Innovation

Some of you may have noticed elsewhere an announcement regarding the recent publication of “The Open Innovation Marketplace” by myself, InnoCentive co-founder,  Alph Bingham, and InnoCentive CEO, Dwayne Spradlin.  We wanted to communicate directly with you about this bit of news because you are an integral part of it.  In this book, we often reference you and your contributions as we speak of a Solver population and the amazing capabilities of that network, punctuated with a few concrete examples.

But let’s back up and make clear that this book is not and was not intended to be “The InnoCentive Story.”  Not that such a book shouldn’t be written — just that, this is not it.  As Dwayne and I point out in the Afterword, “…there were a few areas …that we could not address sufficiently in the book. First was the desire to tell InnoCentive’s story from its founding to the present—and forward, to what might come next. Indeed the story is like no other, and is one that we love to tell … (and another missing piece) was the call for many more case studies telling the amazing stories of InnoCentive’s Solvers and their ingenuity and dedication in finding solutions to problems.  … there is no doubt that we are at the center of a hotbed of activity that is shattering all the prior notions of how innovation happens, how organizations should access and manage talent, and why people do what they do. We observe and facilitate unbelievably inspiring stories of the power of crowds to do everything from accelerating industrial research, to imagining new business opportunities, to accelerating cures for neglected diseases.”

But of course the experiences of InnoCentive and the impressive stories of Solvers could not be neglected altogether, and we point out in the preface that:  “As executives of InnoCentive, we have used our own business as a laboratory (italics added) for understanding open processes and for examining the way innovation is practiced by ourselves and our many customers and partners…” (more…)

The World Resources Institute, or WRI, is a global think tank that works with organizations to help solve urgent environmental challenges.  WRI recently posted an InnoCentive Challenge, aimed at helping local communities across the globe adapt to changing climate conditions over the next years and decades.  We asked Eliot Metzger, who manages WRI’s research on the Next Practice Collaborative, to tell us a bit more about the Challenge.

Hi Eliot.  Thanks for being with us today.  To start, can you tell us a bit more about World Resources Institute and in particular the Next Practice Collaborative and its role in advancing your mission?

Sure. As you mentioned, WRI is a global environmental think tank that goes beyond research to put ideas into action. We work with governments, companies, and civil society to build solutions to urgent environmental challenges. WRI’s transformative ideas protect the earth and promote development because sustainability is essential to meeting human needs and fulfilling human aspirations in the future.

The Next Practice Collaborative is a project we’ve been developing at WRI to help accelerate innovation and the economic transformations needed to tackle the environmental challenges we face. The next practice concept is something that WRI’s late board member CK Prahalad championed as a way of thinking about the mega-trends that will affect all of us—like climate change impacts, or population growth—and the business opportunities in moving well beyond what we see as ‘best practice’ today. One of those big opportunities and a priority for our work on next practices is advancing solutions that help economies and communities adapt to the impacts of climate change.

Can you tell us why you chose to look to InnoCentive’s global Solver network to find a solution to this Challenge?

Actually, the network was interesting to us for a few reasons. First and foremost, we were intrigued by the potential for finding fresh, creative solutions using an open innovation approach. Innovation is one of WRI’s core values and this was a chance for us to try a new innovation platform to develop climate change solutions. There is a limited universe of people thinking about climate change adaptation and we thought it would be great to expand that universe to include Solvers in several different countries, with different perspectives and areas of expertise.

And with our interest in creating a communication platform to share climate change impacts, needs, and solutions, we wanted to access a community of people with a wide range of knowledge and experience. Especially since this is a Challenge that really doesn’t fall into just one or two disciplines. We expect there are lots of great ideas out there among people who have expertise relating to information and communications technologies, or who have experience working with databases, or engaging communities. This is a great opportunity to connect with those people to try to solve some really important and complex problems.

There is sometimes debate about how serious climate change is, and how much of an impact it will have. Would you care to share your views on this? (more…)

Introducing  “The Open Innovation Marketplace”

By Alpheus Bingham and Dwayne Spradlin

We are pleased to announce that our new book “The Open Innovation Marketplace: Creating Value in the Challenge Driven Enterprise” is now available, published by FT Press.

Over a year in the making, we worked to create a book which would appeal to business decision makers, innovation leaders, and strategists.  Our premise is this: Firms must adapt to survive in the 21^st century.  In this new “normal”, business is global, distributed, dynamic, and fast paced.  Markets are hyper competitive and you are only as good as your last business, product, or technology innovation.  Execution is critical, but not sufficient to succeed.  Business leaders must fundamentally rethink their strategies to become more agile, flexible, and innovative than ever – and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Watch: Dwayne Spradlin discusses The Open Innovation Marketplace

We have divided the book into 9 chapters, grouped into two sections:

Chapter 1: “Introduction”

Every business and undertaking is based upon probabilities and portfolio management. Bets are made every day in every corporation, whether determining the next drug to develop in the pharmaceutical industry, building a factory, or choosing the next CEO. Understanding how to best manage those risks and maximize options is fundamental to good business management, which is particularly true in a world where constant innovation and smart risk taking is the new normal. Effective leaders must balance their resources between efforts of exploration and exploitation. Open innovation offers an enhanced toolbox for accomplishing these things. The purposes of the bets, the portfolios, and the risk management are to produce innovations that distinguish one company from another in the marketplace. To this end, all leaders must engage in meta-innovation — innovating on the way they innovate.

(more…)

ITT Watermark, the corporate citizenship division of ITT, recently posted a Challenge aimed at educating people about the importance of clean drinking water.  We asked Bjorn von Euler, Director Corporate Philanthropy for ITT Corporation to tell us a bit more about this Challenge.

Hello Bjorn.  Thanks for talking with us today. ITT Watermark works with a number of non-governmental organizations to educate and empower communities to manage local water resources. Can you tell us a bit about ITT Watermark and why you decided to work with InnoCentive on this Challenge?

ITT Watermark works with three partners: Water For People in India, Honduras, Guatemala and Peru; China Women’s Development Foundation in China and Mercy Corps around the world on natural disasters response and mitigation. Our work must be sustainable. We chose to prioritize the next generation, which is why we have focused our work on bringing safe water, sanitation and hygiene education to schools and their communities. Together with our partners we have come to realize the importance of a holistic approach. It does not help much to provide all of the above in a school if the family is still lacking them.

It does not help if the water in the well is safe when the water is transported in buckets full of bacteria or if when it reaches home it is stored in a tank that has not been washed for a long time. Many times people know that they should cook the water for it be safe – but don’t have wood or gas to heat it.

The business case is clear – you need workers that are healthy. When we saw this opportunity with InnoCentive – we thought – lets try to see if brilliant people outside our sector can find ways to inspire and educate families and communities in need to understand what to do to change their lives.

With this Challenge, you are looking to educate illiterate populations about the importance of purifying drinking water. On the surface it seems like such a simple and fundamental piece of knowledge. What are the potential issues you face in educating illiterate populations on this?

First of all – you have to realize that the solution is heavily weighted toward the social side: Drive awareness, Develop this to desire, Develop a plan to bring safe water and sanitation to the location and for its sustainable operation – including co- financing of the services. Then create budgets and establish pay and collection systems. Finally, define maintenance and service procedures and identify suppliers of backup systems, etc.

To achieve above you need time and people – lots of it.

Great communication programs are needed – that move people to a position where they want to make the change and actively search for help and solutions. (more…)

By Dwayne Spradlin, InnoCentive CEO

LEARNINGS FROM THE BP OIL SPILL

As many of you know, the InnoCentive team and InnoCentive’s Global Solver Community mobilized quickly in the earliest days of the BP Oil Spill Crisis in order to drive ideas and solutions into the hands of emergency responders and British Petroleum. Recognizing the seriousness of the situation, we literally had calls out for solutions within days. And clearly our Global Solver Community stepped up to meet the challenge. Thousands of solutions were received from all over the world addressing technical solutions to the spill, approaches to recovering the oil, and remediating the environmental and human health impact. Their efforts were incredible and validate the potential of crowdsourcing and open innovation to provide solutions on demand in even the most challenging situations.

You may also recall, that after months of working with BP representatives, government officials, and others, it was clear that British Petroleum would not agree to coordinate efforts with InnoCentive. BP would not answer technical questions from our Solvers and would not agree to review proposed solutions. BP did eventually open up its own call for ideas and proposals. But their approach was far too broad, unfocused, and lacked sufficient transparency (particularly related to accurate technical data at the spill site) to elicit truly valuable submissions. Some argued they were simply responding to media pressure. Regardless, it was likely too little and too late to be make any real difference.

Notwithstanding BP’s lack of engagement, we at InnoCentive were so inspired by the early efforts that we promptly announced a commitment to provide our services pro bono in other qualifying crisis situations and we quickly launched the Emergency Response 2.0 Pavilion. We did this because as an organization we know it to be simply the right thing to do. Of course we’d need to understand when and how to action that commitment, particularly difficult given the inherent chaos and complexity that surrounds crisis situations by definition. (more…)