Perspectives on Innovation

This post was written by Innovation Program Manager Dan Kuster, who designed and developed a large portion of the next generation Prodigy online scoring system.

When we ask Solvers and Seekers how to improve the open innovation experience, we consistently hear about a need for quick and useful feedback. After all, Solvers are committing time and resources for a chance to win an award…as a Solver, it can be hard to know if it is worth the effort. On the other hand, Seekers feel the burden of uncertainty too, by exposing valuable problems to the world in the hope that someone will have a solution. If it were possible to pre-evaluate a submission, then Solvers would be able to estimate the risk in developing a full solution, and Seekers could manage an open innovation project with greater certainty of the results.

The Prodigy online scoring system was developed as an attempt to provide some quick and objective feedback, by providing Solvers with a single number score indicating the quality of their submission, relative to the Challenge Requirements, and to other Solvers. The first incarnation of the Prodigy system compared a Solver’s predictions to a known answer, and reported how well the Solver was able to predict the known answer. The next generation of Prodigy takes the idea of online feedback even further, by allowing Solvers to upload native R code. A Solver’s code is dynamically evaluated, in real-time, on our standardized server hardware, where performance can be measured objectively on an independent set of data.  For Solvers, this means you can spend your effort developing good code, and when your score is good, you know it is worthwhile to invest the time in making a full submission. For Seekers, this means submissions are guaranteed to work, because performance has already been demonstrated on an independent system with independent data.

If you are interested in trying out the Prodigy scoring system for yourself, check out this Challenge: https://www.innocentive.com/ar/challenge/9932794. An upcoming blog post will show “How To” write R code for this Challenge, make a submission to the Prodigy online scoring system, and see how you stack up against other Solvers.

While the Prodigy scoring systems begin to address the need for quick and useful feedback early in the open innovation experience, we realize there are even more opportunities to enable Solvers to focus on the most interesting and valuable solutions, especially beyond the domain of computational or analytical Challenges. Do you have an idea that would make the open innovation experience better?  Leave a comment to let us know!

If you are a follower of the illustrious Ig Nobel awards, then you probably know that they were awarded last night.  “The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.”

Among this year’s winners was a team that could find “No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise”, and determined “the ideal density of airborne wasabi (pungent horseradish) to awaken sleeping people in case of a fire or other emergency, and for applying this knowledge to invent the wasabi alarm.”

Since our Solvers are the most creative people we know, we thought this would be a perfect theme for our 2012 Video Challenge.  We’re asking Solvers to create a video demonstrating Unlikely Innovation – the idea that innovation can be found in the most unlikely of areas, and that innovation is limited only by one’s creativity.  Is there something that doesn’t exist, but should?  Is there an idea you’d like to explore for no good reason at all?  Is there an invention you’ve been thinking about creating but can’t imagine what anyone would do with it?  If you can capture it in a video, you could win $5000.

We’ll award Solvers in three categories – best video overall, best video by a college student or team from the US and best video by a college student or team from outside the US.  First prize will be $5000 – the 2 runners up will receive iPads.  More details can be found in the Challenge statement here.

Good luck – we can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Corinne Le Buhan was recently selected as the winner of The Economist-Innocentive Human Potential Index Challenge. In addition to the $10,000 award, Corinne was invited to present her solution at The Economist Ideas Economy: Human Potential conference in New York in September 2011. You can view her full solution here, and her presentation here.

How did you hear about InnoCentive and why did you become an InnoCentive Solver?

Curiosity brought me to Innocentive in the first place. As a freelance consultant in intellectual property and innovation management, I wanted to better understand how innovation crowdsourcing works in practice and what new opportunities it enables for my customers. This approach is not very well known yet and is often feared because of the loss of control it seems to imply, but that can be addressed with the right framework and process. So, I registered as a Solver to test it… and ended submitting an ideation Challenge on my own simply because it was inspiring me.

Have you attempted other InnoCentive Challenges?

So far, I have not attempted other Innocentive Challlenges, but I did consider a few. It’s a lot of work to compile a good proposal. You need to gather the relevant part of your background knowledge, you need to devote some time to further explore what other solutions already exist elsewhere and enrich your thinking accordingly, and then you still need to articulate your nascent ideas as clearly as possible to formalize a suitable answer to the Challenge requirements. This process is somewhat similar capturing a technical invention into a good patent description and claims… you need significant quiet time to think and write about it! So I can only work on Challenges when I have enough free time left besides my day-to-day business.

What motivated you to work on the Challenge that you ended up winning?

What particularly motivated me to devote extra-hours building an answer to the Human Potential Index Challenge was its larger purpose and meaning than what I’m usually working on. In my humble view, GDP-based metrics are depressing the whole western economies in a schizophrenic way as we grow GDP at the expense of other goals such as environmental preservation. Still, I personally have the opportunity to interact with a number of creative and positive-minded engineers who have not given up their faith in mankind capability to design new technologies, even if sometimes just for the fun of it. So I thought there must be a way to better capture that, as a human potential index measurement, than with GDP-derived metrics, and that where I started from.

What do you like about working on Challenges?

I like working on almost anything, and Challenges are even more rewarding because it is a creative work. I also like more and more being able to connect and share knowledge from very different fields as my life experience and understanding develops. Challenges like the one I submitted provide a very good opportunity to do so.

What would you like to see happen with your solution?

I now try to integrate my proposal into a larger initiative. I’m using the visibility it gave me to connect to other people with the same concerns and hopes on the need for a better human potential development measurement. I think there’s room for further formalism and prototyping from real data in this area, but this requires funding of some sort. Ideas that are not implemented in the end are just ideas, not innovations… that’s nice, but a bit worthless. I hope we can move to the next step, and have already started to connect to other Challengers to evaluate if there’s enough momentum to further build something concrete out of our respective ideas, expertise and networks.

You can read Corinne’s bio at http://www.ipstudies.ch/about/

Today we released a new round of four Life Technologies Grand Challenges. Matt Dyer, Ph.D., Senior Product Manager at Ion Torrent answers some questions about the Grand Challenge Program and offers tips for interested Solvers.

Can you tell us a bit about the Life Technologies Grand Challenge Program?

The Life Technologies Grand Challenge Program consists of three separate Challenges, each of which has a $1M prize associated with it. The three Challenges are Speed, Scalability, and Accuracy. The speed Challenge is centered on going from genomic DNA to pressing the start button on the Ion Torrent Personal Genome Machine(TM). If a Solver can do that in half the amount of time as we can do it, they win $1M. The focus on the scalability Challenge is to get more data from a single run of the PGM either by generating more reads or by my making the reads longer. If a Solver can double the throughput of a single run, you win $1M. Finally, the accuracy Challenge. The accuracy Challenge is unique in that it is purely a bioinformatics Challenge and Solvers don’t need to have a PGM to participate. The goal here is to take a subset of reads in which the bases calls are 99% accurate and develop a better signal processing algorithm to make them 99.5% accurate. The Solver that can cut the error rate in half wins $1M.

In general the Life Technologies Grand Challenge Program is a typical crowd sourcing initiative (e.g., Netflix), but with one subtle difference. Since these Challenges all involve core pieces of the platform, we continue to work on them along side Solvers. Each quarter we release the current benchmarks along with protocols and software used to generate them and Solver have three months to work on and submit a solution. At the end of the three month if the Challenges remain unsolved, we update the benchmarks and the process starts over.

Wow, $1M that’s a pretty big prize pool? Why are these Challenges so important to Life Technologies?

It is about shared innovation, semiconductor sequencing in and of itself is built on innovations that happen from many others across a wide range of industries. For example the computing industry, semi-conductor industry, sequencing manufacturing industry, etc. Additionally, a lot of what we are doing is open source like our software where we release our source code. The Grand Challenges represent a continuation of shared innovation. We realize that there are a lot of really bright people in this world. Why not empower them and leverage their insights and innovation by building a community and platform where they can openly share their ideas.

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The Economist and Qualcomm have a question for you. What’s the biggest challenge facing your community that you think can be solved in 2012? Whether you think of your community as the block you live on or the planet we all share, everyone has an answer to that question.

If you can take a photograph or video of the problem and send it to us, you could win $1000 and a trip for two to New York to attend the Economist’s World in 2012 Festival. Possibly even more importantly, your idea will be heard by people who might be able do something about it.

Enter now – all it takes is a click of the camera and a desire to change the world for the better.