Perspectives on Innovation

I recently read a blog post on the Harvard Business Review that falls into InnoCentive’s “sweet spot” of out-of-the-box-thinking and diversity.

The article, Want Innovative Thinking? Hire from the Humanities by Tony Golsby-Smith, is about the importance of diversity in the workplace – the diversity of thought, knowledge and academic background. Many of our Solvers have solved InnoCentive Challenges that are outside their sphere of expertise, but because of their cerebral dexterity, coupled with imagination, experience, knowledge and adaptability, have allowed them to solve Challenges that the domain’s owner had not envisioned. Case in point: Solver Bruce Cragin is a semiretired radio frequency engineer who won the NASA Challenge “Data-Driven Forecasting of Solar Events.” The Challenged was looking for a suitable method to more reliably predict the particle storms originating with solar events. Though Cragin had various degrees & experiences in physics, engineering and as a radio frequency engineer, he’d never worked in the area of solar physics. His experience with image analysis skills, interest in “small comet hypothesis” and curiosity about the theory of magnetic reconnection” enabled him to connect the dots.

Golsby-Smith does not address related disciplines in his article, but he goes one step further and recommends hiring graduates that are not only in science, business or economics, but in the humanities. He argues that these graduates are taught how to navigate look up and out to question and discover the “unknowns”. Graduates of philosophy, drama, literature, ethics, history, etc are, by the very nature of their subject matter, taught to “play with big concepts” – to observe people and situations, to be curious, to consider “why”, what were they thinking”, “what if”, etc.  This is the kind of thinking that needs to be included in a world full of analytics, reasoning, and dissection, when faced with “a murky future”.

It is an interesting article and has elicited quite a lot of comments. Check it out here.

We recently announced that the City of Boston has posted a Challenge seeking the development of a computer algorithm that can accurately identify the location and severity of potholes in city streets.  We asked Boston Mayor Thomas Menino to talk to us about this Challenge.

Hello Mayor Menino.  Thanks very much for talking to us today about your Challenge.  Potholes are a routine problem for cities, especially in areas where harsh winter weather and snow plows take their toll.  How do you expect this Challenge will help Boston better address the pothole problem?

In 2010, the City received nearly 4,000 pothole reports from constituents and filled over 7,000 potholes, making it one of our biggest service issues.  This Challenge will enhance Street Bump, which is our app for smart phones that helps to detect when a car hits a pothole.  The better this app is able to detect potholes, the sooner our Public Works crews will be able to fill them. No one likes hitting a pothole.  But with Street Bump, if you hit a pothole, the City could get notified and we can hopefully respond before it can be hit again.  We maintain over 800 miles of roadway, so improvements in this process will have a big impact on the drivers, cyclists and pedestrians using the streets throughout our City.

What led you to post this Challenge on the InnoCentive web site?

I am a strong believer that the best results come from engaging the public.  InnoCentive allows us to do just that.  Through the InnoCentive platform, Boston will have access to over 250,000 of the world’s most creative minds, providing them with the opportunity to address one of Boston residents’ biggest issues.  The fundamental premise of Street Bump relies on citizens to help the City collect data on road conditions, so it’s also a natural for us to turn to the global community of Solvers to help find the best algorithm to analyze that data.

While you are tapping InnoCentive’s worldwide community of Solvers, you’ve also established a special prize for residents of Boston or students at Boston’s universities.  What was the thinking behind that?

Boston is fortunate to be home to some of the brightest minds and most engaged residents in the world.  My team wants to encourage our students and residents to tackle this Challenge, volunteering their time and talents in an original way to make Boston even better.  We hope the dedicated prize helps achieve just that.

We see that this is a project of the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics.  Can you tell us more about that?

The Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics is my research & development team.  They explore non-traditional approaches to addressing key urban issues, from neighborhood quality of life to education to economic development.  Many of their projects, such as Street Bump and the Street Bump Challenge, focus on leveraging new technology to involve constituents in the design and delivery of new services.

Once the City has selected the winning submission, what are your plans and expectations regarding implementation of the solution?

Potholes are a universal issue, and I want Street Bump to be a tool that any city or town can use to combat this problem.  For that reason, once we have selected the winning submission, we will launch an enhanced version of the Street Bump app and make it available for any City to use.

Fantastic.  Thanks again and good luck with your Challenge.

Thank You.

We recently discovered that InnoCentive was being used as a teaching tool by Dr. Andrew Trivett P.Eng., Associate Professor at the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown, PE.  We love this idea, and asked Dr. Trivett to tell us more about his class and the benefits of using InnoCentive Challenges to teach engineering students about design.

Many of you, particularly if you’ve studied engineering in the past 20 years in North America, have encountered the first-year “design project course”. Every university engineering department has one of these, and I confess, I’ve taught them myself. While they can be fun, I’m not a fan of the common “here’s a box of junk, now go build something” projects. There is so much more we can do for students. My contrary opinion landed me in trouble a while back. I was invited to give a talk at a workshop for faculty on the subject of “teaching design”. In my talk, I showed pictures of first-year students working with industrial mentors on everything from waste sludge management at an electric generating plant to a low-cost eye-in-the-sky kite for photographing real-estate (yes, that’s right…I said first-year students… the 18 year-olds we usually think of as too young and inexperienced for any real work) . My talk ended with the statement “ We try to show students that engineering is a career where we solve REAL, and IMPORTANT problems for REAL people… it isn’t just silly, made-up problems like pick up this ping-pong ball and place it over there before the other team does”. Unfortunately, the next speaker at the workshop, an excellent professor in a large Canadian University, stood up to describe his class’ project over the past year… you guessed it… it was “design a device to pick up a ping-pong ball and place it on the platform over there using this box of stuff”. Ouch…

So what’s so wrong with the “box-of-junk” design projects for student engineers? After all, they give students experience with teamwork, they force them to employ basic physics in solving a problem, and to use limited resources to make something work, all of which are useful skills. They also reward creativity and attention to detail, both good attributes for future engineers.

Unfortunately, I believe they subtly tell would-be-engineers that the practice of engineering is silly and irrelevant. Which of us actually remembers the details of our first-year box-of-junk project anyway? (more…)

We recently announced the publication of The Open Innovation Marketplace, written by InnoCentive Founder Alph Bingham and CEO Dwayne Spradlin.  In the post below, Alph Bingham shares his thoughts on Challenge Driven Innovation.

Business processes make companies smart. They are one of the primary means for archiving and retrieving institutional knowledge. They are what allows Boeing to build a plane or Pfizer to launch a drug — when in all likelihood NO one employee of any company knows what it takes to accomplish those tasks. But in spite of enabling this almost magical quality of collective knowledge, business processes also make companies dumb. They can archive and institutionalize modes of behavior no longer relevant. They all have a “discard by” date, but too few get discarded on time.

Many of the current business processes related to innovation were forged before the world became “connected.” They assumed a reality that ceased to exist as we rolled into a new century. New innovation processes need to be hung on an innovation architecture that reflects a world where knowledge is fluid, where connections are fast and where outcome transcends geography. Corporate innovation practices assume a closed system — or at least one that is predominately so. Leaders have read much and talked much about the new era of open innovation but how many have rewritten their business innovation processes, how many have changed their metrics for innovation success and how many have gone back and redefined the gate criteria separating the stages of their innovation cycle?

Innovation is risky business. And to manage those risks, project gating criteria are selected that prevent an overabundance of false positives. That is to say that projects likely to fail are periodically reviewed and terminated before they burn too many resources and too much cash. But if those expenses were shared by a partner or better by a network, such terminations would in most instances be premature. (more…)