Perspectives on Innovation

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

Last week I had the pleasure attending the Economist’s Ideas Economy Conference on Information in the heart of Silicon Valley – Santa Clara, CA. As usual, the event was a star-studded (well ‘stars’, at least in the mind of this geek) event with representative leaders from government, big business, small business, public policy, not-for-profit and Academia.  A correspondent from the Economist emceed each session at the conference thereby ensuring that the content was top-notch.  The in-depth conversations on so-called ‘big data’, social media, crowdsourcing, healthcare and open government, just to name a few topics, were a virtual intellectual amusement park of entertainment.  Rarely do I have the opportunity to imbibe such high-caliber content.

As part of the event there were some particularly notable elements that I wanted to (attempt to) recapitulate within this blog entry.

As part of his talk, Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains spoke about how it is that us humans engage with information and knowledge. He brought up several interesting elements in his talk, but one struck me as particularly relevant. He said that studies have found that our brains actually have dopamine-like response to the acquisition of new data or knowledge. In fact our brains naturally crave such stimuli and the sort of high that ensues. Could this, perhaps, be one reason by Seeker and Solvers are so attracted to InnoCentive Challenges? Our Solvers love the opportunity, via a challenge, to find or create new knowledge and our Seekers love gaining new insights to solve their most precious Challenges?  I suspect that this may represent some of the non-monetary appeal of our Challenges – though clearly further study would be needed. As Solvers, do you get a high out of discovering information?  Do our Challenges provide that sort of an intense stimulation for you? Drop you comments at the end of this post. (more…)

Today’s blog post was contributed by InnoCentive Marketing Manager Tim O’Brien.

If you’ve visited InnoCentive.com in the past week, you probably noticed that nearly every Challenge now has a referral award in addition to a Challenge award. This referral award is paid out to InnoCentive users who play a key role in the Challenge-solving process by exposing the Challenge to the person who is ultimately motivated and able to solve it.

At InnoCentive, we believe that diversity of experience can overcome the toughest Challenges. Time and time again, winning Solvers hail from backgrounds outside of the domain of the Challenges they solve. But for Seekers, lack of diversity is a serious limiting factor of innovation; after all, every organization is limited by the number of employees and contractors that it’s able to employ.

We address the diversity constraint by identifying problems that matter within Seeker organizations, formulating them as discrete Challenges, and then broadcasting those Challenges to the world. Yet, in a world of billions of internet-connected individuals, posting a Challenge on InnoCentive.com is not always sufficient for reaching the individual with the right set of experiences to develop a winning solution. Given that it’s unrealistic to expect every potential Solver to read every Challenge, we’ve recognized and responded to the need for a new role in the InnoCentive community: the Connector.

A Connector acts as an innovation catalyst, reading Challenges and then intelligently broadcasting them to potentially interested and capable audiences. By acting as a Connector, you play a vital role in the innovation process whenever you refer a Challenge to the person who ultimately solves it. Here’s how it works: Visit the Challenge Center or a Challenge summary or details page of almost any Challenge to generate and share a unique referral link to that Challenge; if you refer the winner to the Challenge with your referral link, you’ll receive a referral award in recognition of your crucial role in motivating the winning Solver to read that Challenge and submit a solution. In addition, if you introduce new Solvers to InnoCentive by referring them to Challenges before they’ve registered accounts on InnoCentive.com, you’ll earn an award for each one who wins any Challenge within a year.

One major benefit of the Challenge Referral Program is the enhanced relevance of every Challenge. Even if you’re sure you can’t solve a given Challenge on your own, it’s still worth reading the overview or details and thinking “who might be able to Solve this Challenge.” If you refer the Challenge to the right person, you’ll receive a referral award of up to $10,000 USD. Who knows, maybe just reading and considering the Challenge will prompt an unexpected ‘eureka.’ Either way, there’s never been a better time to get serious about following Challenges. To help you keep an eye on and share the latest Challenges as easily as possible, we’ve just released InnoCentive Anywhere, a free mobile app for iPhone and Android devices.

InnoCentive community members aren’t the only ones excited about this new program: “Life Technologies is very excited to be participating in InnoCentive’s referral program,” says Nigel Beard, Head of Scientific Operations of Life Technologies. “This program is designed to extend the reach of Challenges by tapping into the intellectual networks of the existing Solver community. Not only does this provide the potential to increase the number of active Solvers, but more importantly, it allows us to get these complex research Challenges in front of the best minds with the highest probability of solving them.” By referring Challenges such as “Life Grand Challenge: Twice the Accuracy of Genome Sequencing,” you could play a vital role in advancing the next generation of DNA sequencing technologies!

To get started, visit the Challenge overview page of any Challenge with a referral award (nearly all Challenges have one!). On the page, you’ll see a referral module which makes it easy to broadcast the Challenge to potential Solvers. For more information, visit Start Referring.

Please leave your comments and reactions below!

I’ve been thinking recently and have come to realize a striking connection between getting healthy and Open Innovation.  One is about improving personal health and fitness and the other about the efficiency and competitiveness of our organizations.

As Alph Bingham and I write in The Open Innovation Marketplace (FT Press, April 2011), organizations need to be more lean, agile, and innovative than ever in this connected, global, hyper competitive economy.  But why do we even use words like ‘lean’ and ‘agile’ in reference to business efficiency? It is because these powerful images of human health provide us with a shared vocabulary to help talk about the complex world around us and to relate it to our own experience and struggles.

Individually, we ask: Are we fit? Or are we strong enough?  Leaders in organizations use the same language: What is the health of an important initiative? How do we drive business agility? Are we operating at peak performance?  Deep down, we view firms as living and breathing organisms (the word ‘corporation’ actually comes from the Latin root for body) and the metaphor is a perfectly natural one.

I find this use of this language fascinating because the metaphor provides a clue to the difficulty companies have in adapting and remaining competitive.  Individually, we all desire to be healthier which becomes more difficult as we get older.  And while we all know the importance of diet and exercise, we seem to be heading in the wrong direction in many cases.  So why don’t we do more to be active and healthy?  Because it is hard.  It is really, really hard.  It takes enormous commitment and discipline and we are often not committed enough to follow through.  We are trading off a difficult and uncertain future for gratification today.  Sometimes there are other health issues to be sure, but overwhelmingly we opt for the here and now.  We know the consequences.  Often it takes a wake up call from the doctor to prompt real action. (more…)

(The quest for a new name for Deutsche Boerse and the NYSE Euronext)

Some months ago the Deutsche Boerse and the New York Stock Exchange merged to become the biggest stock exchange in the world. This is a huge step in creating a global community based on fewer and more cohesive regulations (hopefully!) with a greater degree of transparency.

The new, unnamed company (jointly headquartered in Frankfurt and New York) is now in search of a name, one that represents each individual entity’s histories, nationality, culture and pride. Even though Deutsche Boerse controls 60 percent of the new exchange, there are many who feel that the “NYSE,” because of its age and reputation, should not only be reflected in the new name, but should come first.

Given the significant and high profile role a stock exchange plays in a country’s economy, and in this case two countries, plus the rest of the world, it stands to reason that this cannot be an exercise in frivolity. So what should two prideful old-timers do? They can ask their employees.

Working with Interbrand, Deutsche Boerse and the NYSE Euronext are asking their employees (6,000 plus) to submit their suggestions online to a digital suggestion box. Interbrand will help both sides of the Atlantic to sort, categorize and analyze the submissions as well as help them keep the strategic vision for the new brand at the forefront when deciding on finalists – a logistical task that we at InnoCentive are very familiar with! The goal is to have a name sometime in the summer of 2011.

It will be interesting to see what name is finally chosen. This venture could be a fascinating insight into the minds of the employees and produce some interesting monikers. InnoCentive crowdsources names from our employees – we’ve named conference rooms, the @Work platform, our product phases and even our newsletters! I can admit from personal experience that Interbrand will have a very interesting time sifting through those suggestions!

We recently had a news mention from the unlikeliest of venues – ESPN! I’m sure many of you will say the same thing we did: “ESPN, the sports network? How is that relevant?” Well, innovation is relevant in all avenues of life, and that includes business, leisure and professional sports. This brings us to ESPN, and the author’s interest in innovation, crowdsourcing and prizes.

The author begins the article with “top-tier surfing” contests at Bells Beach and Rio’s Billabong Pro, Lowers Pro’s “MVP,” Nike 6.0’s “Cash for Tricks” and Volcom’s “kick-flip on camera” challenge, where she has witnessed surfers driven to produce some “performance evolution” kicks, flips and other tricks. She notes that besides the adrenaline-rush and the chance to perform in front of their peers, cash prizes do not hurt in encouraging them to come up with innovative new moves. And why stop there she asks. Why not “ask” or crowdsource innovation within the rest of the surfing industry, like seamless, slimmer, resilient wetsuits and environmentally friendly and surfboard materials and a host of other inventions and enhancements.

Hence, the mention of InnoCentive, crowdsourcing and prize-based innovation; while the idea of prize-based innovation isn’t new, she credits the World Wide Web and InnoCentive with accelerating the use of crowdsourcing and cash prizes for “linking regular people with ideas to problems.” Have a read – the article is so well written and you don’t have to be a surfer to understand and enjoy it!