Perspectives on Innovation

Adrian Perez won the Challenge Communication Platform to Connect Vulnerable Communities with Climate Change Solutions.

Currently I live in Savannah, Georgia, USA. I moved to Savannah from Honduras for tertiary schooling at the Savannah College of Art and Design. My academic specialty is the built environment with specific interests in systems thinking, interaction design, and sustainability.   Upon completion of my schooling, I moved to Kenya where I was doing work with the United Nation Human Settlements Programme under the Disaster Management Programme looking into subjects such as appropriate technologies, human displacement, and climate change. I eventually returned to Savannah and became involved with an organization called the Emergent Structures Projects (ESP). ESP’s mission is to increase the value and accessibility to building material waste streams through facilitation, collaboration, education and advocacy.

I heard about InnoCentive at a lecture by Jonah Lehrer titled “How We Decide”. He spoke about how the human mind comes to a moment of epiphany, a solution; he talked about how out-of the-box thinking is a product of interdisciplinarity, open-mindedness and moments of rest.  In discussing this subject matter, he mentioned InnoCentive.com. I remember making a mental note of this for future investigation. I have since been a loyal frequenter to the site.

On one of these ‘frequent visits’ I found a Challenge posted by the World Resource Institute for creating a communication platform to connect vulnerable communities to climate change solutions. As I read through it, I became excited, as I was able to relate to certain thematic areas due to my previous experiences in Kenya. Shortly after, I began doing my research on the three main subjects of the challenge: climate change, communication platforms and human vulnerability. Over time, I began to form parallels between the three subjects and eventually began presenting my ideas to friends over coffee. After much frustration, moments of rest and a fast approaching deadline, a final idea was decided on and submitted. After that, one can only wait. It wasn’t after losing hope that I received a congratulations email from InnoCentive.

I find that InnoCentive reflects the spirit of the age; it takes advantage of today’s connectivity, allowing for disassociated and wildly diverse input of human experience, targeting the same problem, equating to well-rounded, inclusive solutions. Thank you InnoCentive!

We recently announced a Challenge with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) to improve sanitary conditions for more than a billion people in the world using pit latrines.  We asked the Director of Sanitation Ventures, run by LSHTM, to provide a bit of background on the problem at the heart of this Challenge.

Hi Walter.  Can you tell us a bit about Sanitation Ventures and how you’re connected to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine?

Good sanitation is one of the greatest advances in public health, yet it remains unavailable to billions of poor people in developing countries. Around 1.7 billion people worldwide still use one of the most basic forms of on-site (non-piped) sanitation, the pit latrine. And they face a recurring problem: the contents don’t decompose fast enough or fully, and the pits fill up. This seriously undermines people’s health and quality of life.

Sanitation Ventures is a three-year project to tackle these problems, run by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. I was involved in developing the proposal with LSHTM and the UK development agency Oxfam. We’re a diverse team of business professionals, scientists, academic researchers and innovation specialists, who want a world where safe, sustainable sanitation is accessible to everyone.

Our approach is based on two core beliefs:

• Many recent scientific advances, particularly in biotechnology, can be readily applied to improving sanitation in sustainable, affordable ways
• Market-led approaches are the best way to provide novel, sustainable interventions to address key development challenges.

Building on the latest advances in science and technology, we’re generating new knowledge about pit latrines and developing innovations in on-site sanitation that will offer longer-lasting, affordable sanitation for low-income users. The BSF larvae approach is just one of several we’re exploring. We’ll then help make sure these solutions are successfully brought to market, where they can have sustainable impact on users’ lives.

Your Challenge is essentially seeking a way to keep pit latrines from overfilling, using black soldier fly (BSF) larvae.  How did this idea of using BSF come about and has it been proven to work elsewhere? (more…)

In March of this year, we started sending a “Certificate of Performance” for winning Solvers to put on display in recognition of their accomplishment. This month, due to feedback from Solvers in the Winning Solvers LinkedIn group, we decided to send out certificates for every single Challenge awarded to any Solver who had logged in to InnoCentive within the past two years. This translated to over 800 certificates to be printed, stuffed in to addressed envelopes, and then mailed all around the world. I documented the whole process so that you guys can get a peek inside InnoCentive!

A stack of Challenge certificates, all for top Solver Yury Bodrov

The massive pile of certificates. We're going to need some help...

First, we lured everyone in to the conference room.

Then we put them to work

Fueled by pizza, we made short work of addressing and stuffing the envelopes. Here's Mike Bittarelli sorting the enveloped by country.

If you’ve won a Challenge, you should receive a certificate in the mail any day.

Keep on Solving!

Please join us on Tuesday, December 13th at 2:00pm EST for “Harness the Global Talent Pool to Accelerate Innovation” a free webinar featuring Braden Kelley, industry thought leader and co-founder of innovationexcellence.com

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

How some of the most well-known companies manage their open innovation efforts

Why having a talent network strategy is becoming increasingly important; and

How to utilize open innovation and crowdsourcing resources to drive your business.

by Alph Bingham, Founder and Board Member, InnoCentive

Recently Dwayne Spradlin and I published a blog titled “Why Challenges will transform the future of innovation, work and business” in which we laid the groundwork for the topic “What is A Challenge?”  In this blog, we described the Challenge as:

We committed to exploring each of these facets in more depth.  In today’s post, we’re going to begin the discussion of the Challenge as the fundamental unit of problem solving.

The Challenge as fundamental unit of problem solving – Part 1

As we worked to create a successful business around this new model, new language sprang up to characterize it.  We have mentioned the coining of the terms “crowdsourcing” by Jeff Howe and “broadcast search” by Karim Lakhani.   Internally InnoCentive used familiar terms in very deliberate ways.  Our customers, providing challenging problems to our network, became “Seekers.”  And our network was one of “Solvers.”  The problems themselves evolved to “Challenges.”  And we used these descriptions as we analyzed questions like:  What was the value proposition to Seekers?  Why did Solvers engage? And how did the properties of the Challenge serve to effectively contribute to its solution?

As we deepened our knowledge of the Challenge and its role and the means of maximizing its service, we recognized that the Challenge shares DNA with the modularity processes, earlier described by Carliss Baldwin and Kim Clark of Harvard Business School. A portion of the global innovation objective is formulated as a Challenge, in which a “Challenge” essentially represents the problem statement for a block of work that can be modularized and in most cases rendered “portable.” That is, such a block of work can be outsourced or insourced as an integral unit. (more…)