Perspectives on Innovation

This week, InnoCentive announced that is has become a General Services Administration (GSA) Schedule contractor. Essentially what this means is that it is now easier for U.S. federal government agencies to engage with InnoCentive to develop and launch Challenges.

As many of our Solvers know, we’ve done some pretty interesting work with the government. In January 2010, NASA’s Johnson Space Center launched an open innovation pavilion on InnoCentive.com. Of NASA’s initial seven Challenges – ranging from protecting astronauts and equipment in space from solar flares to keeping food fresh during long space missions – nearly 3,000 of our Solvers from around the world participated, and more than 350 solutions were proposed. NASA designated full or partial monetary awards for all seven Challenges, and the average time-to-solution for each of the Challenges was only four months.

I always liked this quote from Solver Yury Bodrov, who was rewarded for his submission to NASA’s Improved Food Packaging Challenge: “I was not sure I would be successful, but having NASA scientists evaluate my work was a primary motivation…It is a dream to be recognized by the scientific level of NASA quality.” 

More recently, in March 2011, InnoCentive and the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) announced a collaboration to advance innovation in military research. Through this partnership, the AFRL has successfully solved Challenges, including methods for dropping humanitarian aid without injury to people on the ground and stopping a fleeing vehicle without damaging the vehicle or the driver. The AFRL has since launched new Challenges, most recently Fast Rope Glove Device, currently open to the public and seeks innovative ways for military personnel to descend quickly from a helicopter in hostile situations.

Let’s face it: While we consider all of our Challenges to be important, there’s something cool about participating in NASA, AFRL, and other Challenges posted by government agencies. They spark our collective imaginations and enable us to truly reach for the stars. Stay tuned for other agencies to launch new Challenges on InnoCentive.com in the coming months.

Recently we challenged a team of students from Tufts to create a video in their own voice about what it means to be a problem solver. And to make it particularly challenging, we gave them no resources or guidance.  They’d have to make magic happen with only their creativity, energy, a video camera, and a PC for editing.

The final video, which they titled ‘Don’t let a good idea get away!’ blew us away.  It is fresh, humorous, and captures the power of that “Eureka!” moment all at the same time.

We were so encouraged by the Tufts students that we have decided to award special prizes for our 2012 Video Challenge to teams of College students.  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.

Kudos to the Tufts students who brought this video to life from all of us at InnoCentive!  We love the video and know InnoCentive community will as well!

Enjoy!

Dwayne Spradlin
InnoCentive CEO

Why would Popular Science join forces with InnoCentive? Popular Science is all about problem solving – bringing the world extraordinary and previously unimaginable scientific breakthroughs as far back as the telephone. The notion that groundbreaking innovation can come from anywhere is what has helped Popular Science build such a loyal following among readers. At InnoCentive we believe in the same principles, and have built a community of people from “anywhere” who can’t wait to see what we throw at them next. When we combine Popular Science’s content and readership with InnoCentive’s network of brilliant problem solvers, the result is an explosion of creativity, imagination, ingenuity, and brainpower.

Now you have a chance to “Make Your Ideas Part of the Revolution!”  Popular Science is looking for innovative new ways to teach the next generation of scientists. But time is running out.  The Popular Science/InnoCentive Challenge is only  open for a few more days.  Click here and submit your solution before it’s too late!

Patrick Fuller recently won the Nitrate Capture System Challenge sponsored by the Environmental Defense Fund.

I am currently a Ph.D. candidate in chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern University, collaboratively working on a variety of computational and experimental projects. This work ranges from green energy to catalysis, but all of my projects share one common goal: improving the global standard of living through the design of applied technology.

As an undergraduate at Lehigh University, I discovered my interest in creating “actionable” technology while researching improvements in orthopedic implants. The work in itself was very interesting, but I noticed that there was no infrastructure available to aid in converting successful research into commercial products. To fill this niche, I worked toward and obtained a second degree in finance. This skillset has helped me immensely over the last few years, and I have already found myself useful as a bridge between scientific and business communities.

I learned about InnoCentive through Chris Wilmer, another Ph.D candidate in my department. Come to think of it, this all probably started because his lab has an excellent coffee machine. Weird how that works.

This was my first challenge, which I took up within a few days of discovering InnoCentive. I have since considered a variety of other challenges—even working on experimental data for some—but have only submitted one other solution.

I was immediately drawn toward the nitrate capture problem posed by the Environmental Defense Fund. While my academic background helped, most of the inspiration came from my upbringing. I was raised in a coastal New England town, where oceanography was a large portion of our grade school education. This was coupled with my experience in high school of working in a produce market, where I met farmers using nitrate-consuming algae to fertilize their crops. Following this up with some elementary reaction kinetics, I was able to devise a theoretical solution to nitrate capture. I have since been in contact with the Environmental Defense Fund, and I hope to work with them in testing and implementing my idea!

The World Resources Institute (WRI), a global think tank that works with organizations to help solve urgent environmental challenges, recently completed an InnoCentive Challenge aimed at helping local communities across the globe adapt to changing climate conditions.  We talked with Eliot Metzger at WRI about the Challenge and the winning Solutions.

Hello Eliot.  Thanks for coming back to tell us about your completed Challenge.  Perhaps you can start by reminding our readers about the goals of the Challenge.

One of our primary goals at WRI is to help people adapt to the impacts of climate change and advance innovative solutions that prevent further damage to the global climate system. With this Challenge, we were seeking creative ideas for communicating local needs in communities dealing with climate challenges they have never seen before.

Communities across the globe are confronting more extreme weather, like heat waves, droughts, and floods.  They also are facing more subtle and long-term impacts, which can be equally disruptive. Sea level rise is one well-known example, but there are also food and health risks as a changing climate creates conditions for increasing pest populations or insect-borne disease.

These are global and regional disruptions creating new needs at a local level. A community in Ghana may be looking for new energy sources to compensate for the hydroelectric power supply that is less reliable because of changing rainfall patterns. A coastal community in Vietnam may be in need of infrastructure to deal with increasing tidal floods because of rising sea levels.

We asked for ideas that could leverage new communication models and advances in information and communication technology to meet these needs. Our challenge to the InnoCentive Solvers was to come up with ideas for a communications platform that linked communities, governments, and companies. We want to see information flow from the local level to inform new approaches for national-level decision making and new goods and services from the business community.

This was an Ideation Challenge, and you made four awards.  Tell us your thinking about that decision.

Well, first of all it was difficult to pick just one idea.  There were several that stood above the rest.  And among those, each offered something slightly different.  I can’t say that any one of the solutions we reviewed had exactly what we were looking for, but nearly all the proposals had at least a few interesting ideas.

There were four ideas that were particularly comprehensive, creative, and still quite practical. We decided to recognize and reward each of those Solvers. It was nice to have the flexibility to spread the award money among several good ideas.

Can you share with us some of the most compelling ideas that were awarded? (more…)