Perspectives on Innovation

Below is an excerpt from Chapter 6 of the the recently published “The Open Innovation Marketplace”, written by InnoCentive Founder Alph Bingham and CEO and President Dwayne Spradlin. In this chapter, the authors discuss the meaning of a Challenge, and reveal the 6 things that make a good Challenge.  The entire chapter is now available for download here.  For a limited time, Chapter 3 will also remain available, and can be found here.

“Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful.
Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening,
ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will
never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from
discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.”

—Sir Winston Churchill in Painting as a Pastime

Overview

Imagine every department with a clear picture of its needs, options, and work in process. Imagine each decision being made by managers bound to driving the optimal outcome regardless of where the resources reside. Imagine the vibrancy of an organization whose singular focus is driving performance excellence and not measuring success by patents issued, full-time headcount, or the size of its R&D budget. In such an organization, the CEOs agenda is that of the investor: How can the firm drive the best returns? The CFO not only tracks the business, he also manages risk and opportunity by measuring the effectiveness of all parts of the organization to deliver against its goals—in business and economic terms—with innovation held to the same performance standards as every other part of the organization.

Whether it is marketing, information technology, product development, or manufacturing, every department understands its problems and challenges and its various channels for problem solving, and has the skills to manage the process effectively, take action, and create solutions to drive enterprise value. Too often organizations measure their success by % of sales spent on R&D, how many patents they own, or whether the leading academics in their fields are on retainer. However, in today’s economy, these should all matter much less to the management of the organization or to the shareholders than whether they can get a new product to market before the competition and dominate the category or whether resources are being managed to ensure the firm can aggressively pursue new business opportunities when they emerge. The prevailing mentality of most established businesses slows, if not discourages, innovation while increasing its costs. Ultimately the shareholders pay the price.

Challenge Driven Innovation represents a dramatic evolution in enabling more effective, efficient, and predictable innovation. And our experience with businesses suggests there is enormous benefit simply in managers and employees better defining and managing their own problems. The transformational change, however, is accomplished through the remaking of the organization into the Challenge Driven Enterprise, where the most difficult problems can be solved, effort is aligned with strategic goals, all talent inside and outside of the organization is brought to bear to deliver on the mission, and sustained performance improvement is possible. The Challenge Driven Enterprise represents a new vision with far-reaching implications that can improve the speed, agility, and efficiency of business. It enables new modes of innovation while creating the flexibility to capitalize on new business opportunities. Industry leaders will be those that successfully apply these concepts universally, from business strategy to the manufacturing plant floor.

Read More:  Download this chapter by clicking here.

Solver since 2010

Occupation: Assistant instructor at UT Southwestern medical center
Education: Ph.D in biochemistry
Residence: United States
Challenges awarded: 1

Challenge won: New Innovative Prophylaxis Approaches to Protect Against OP Pesticide Poisoning ($15,000 Challenge)

I’m an assistant instructor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, specializing in bioinformatics and molecular biology. I was born in Castellón, Spain, where I grew up very interested in science, since my father is a biologist and my mother a chemistry teacher. I obtained a B.Sc. in Biochemistry from the University of Barcelona in 1997. While earning my Ph.D. at the University of Valencia, I was privileged to be mentored by Dr. M.D. Ferrando, as well as my own father, who allowed me to open my own research line at one of the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) centers, the Institute of Aquaculture Torre de la Sal, which is located nearby really nice beaches. While working there I realized that innovation was a crucial aspect of science and I began looking for applications of my research into the mechanisms of resistance to oxidative stress and pesticides. That work led to a couple of patents and several papers, one of which was distinguished with the ‘Best Publication Award on Environmental Research’ by the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) and AstraZeneca. A few months after defending my PhD in 2003, I received a postdoctoral fellowship to study the effects of oxidative stress on gene regulation with Dr. Bruce Demple at the Harvard School of Public Health. In 2006 I got the chance to lead a project to uncover the molecular events driving kidney cancer and I moved with Dr. James Brugarolas to UT Southwestern, where I received another postdoctoral fellowship from Generalitat Valenciana.

My own family, like many others, has felt directly the devastating effects of cancer: Though I could not help my brother, I have the satisfaction of identifying some genes involved in renal cell carcinoma, as well as a novel transcription factor regulated by the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR), which plays a critical role in cell growth and is deregulated in about half of human tumors. These findings may create new therapeutic opportunities and someday benefit patients.

The first time I learned about InnoCentive was in an advertisement on nature.com, which got my attention because I knew a good answer to the question it asked. InnoCentive offers a new way of solving problems for companies by reaching out to a wide audience of different backgrounds, but it also gets non-industry-oriented people closer to the issues that really matter to the companies. At the end, innovation promotes the progress of our society and it’s very rewarding to be part of it.

You know crowdsourcing has become mainstream when it is leveraged as a primary tool for selecting sessions and panels at an event/conference. Next year’s South by Southwest (SWSX) conference, an immensely popular event taking place in Austin Texas, features a “panel picker” that enables the crowd to cast a vote for the sessions they would like to see.

We’d like to engage our crowd to vote for a panel featuring the CEOs of  TopCoder and InnoCentive, Jack Hughes and Dwayne Spradlin, along with Jake Ward of Popular Science who will be moderating the panel.

The proposed panel, titled “Open Innovation: Millions of Us Solving Problems,” will discuss how open innovation and crowdsourcing can transform organizations, either through a breakthrough ‘eureka‘ idea or continuous and incremental improvement of a product or service. The panel will discuss what companies from Netflix to NASA to Toyota have gained from putting their biggest Challenges out in front of the general public, and how attendees can do the same. It will also uncover the key issues organizations need to address when incorporating open innovation communities into their own business plans, and how professional problem-solving communities will evolve in the coming years.

Please take a moment to register and vote!

By the way, as I was reading some of the comments on the registration page, I ran across this one from someone named John: “Interesting…crowd-sourced panel picking for a session on open innovation and crowdsourcing. Pretty appropriate I must say.”

We couldn’t agree more John.

Yesterday we announced our collaboration with Popular Science to stimulate worldwide interest in science and technology innovation. The collaboration includes the Popular Science Innovation Pavilion as the destination for a variety of Challenges tailored to engineers, architects, scientists and technologists—as well as the garage tinkerers and basement inventors.  In addition, Popular Science and InnoCentive have launched a Challenge to find a better way to teach science to school children.  Earlier this week, Popular Science’s West Coast Bureau Chief Jacob Ward blogged about this Challenge – an excerpt from his blog is below.  The entire article is available here.

Introducing the Popular Science/InnoCentive Education Challenge

It’s time to get the next generation of scientists thinking about what’s important, and you can help. Below are five education challenges chosen by the editors of Popular Science in partnership with InnoCentive, an open-innovation and crowdsourcing firm. We invite you to devise a simple lesson plan for one or more of them. Each plan should be directed at middle-school students, involve at most three 50-minute sessions, and require less than $50 in materials. The most engrossing, informative and easily replicated approach in each area will earn you a cash reward—and the chance to see your work implemented in classrooms across the country. Visit our Open Innovation Pavilion to register.

Read the rest of the article here.

The following post was written by Ben Sikora, a PhD student at Northwestern University and the first winning Connector from the InnoCentive Challenge Referral Program. Ben will receive a referral award for referring the Challenge “Games for Health: Inspiring Adolescents to take Control of their Health” to a relative who successfully solved it! If you want to become a Connector and earn awards for referring Challenges, simply visit any Challenge and look for the referral module to the right of the Challenge description.

In this day of age where communication between individuals has been reduced to writing on a wall, “chirping” about eating dinner, or telling the world how you feel, it’s hard to find other people you might think are suitable for solving hard problems. However, in my case, the lesson is simple: you don’t have to look that far. Those closest to you may surprise you the most. When referring people, it isn’t about who you think is the smartest, most innovative, or even most creative (even though these help), it is about the interests of the people around you.

I ended up referring my sister’s boyfriend (a game designer), my brother (a computer science major), as well as other family members (which includes a technical writer), and it ended up that this challenge really interested them. My last piece of advice is this: despite the money that could potentially be won from the Innocentive challenge, would the person you are referring enjoy working on that challenge just for fun? If not, then he or she probably is not a good person to refer to that challenge.