Perspectives on Innovation

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…)

The top rated “The Open Innovation Marketplace”, authored by InnoCentive’s Founder Alpheus Bingham and President and CEO Dwayne Spradlin has been receiving positive reviews from innovation practitioners, CEOs and executives, industry analysts and the media.  Though the book presents a comprehensive overview as well as a deep dive into the practice of open innovation, the authors still had more to share.  Below is a chapter that didn’t make it into the book, which we’d like to share with you now.  Enjoy!

Closed Innovation Suboptimizes Solutions – The World Can Do Better.
by Alpheus Bingham, Founder, InnoCentive

One of the expectations of my early career in the pharmaceutical industry was to design new synthetic routes (ways to make medicines). This was for a whole variety of molecules, not just the ones for which I had some special training and experience.  At various times it included heterocycles, beta-lactams, silanes, inorganic salts, and many others. When asked to undertake such a challenge, I usually did so based on my own grasp of chemistry and the aid of a technician or two to carry out the exploratory experiments. That is not to say I never sought help. In fact a small, informal group of seven or eight PhD chemists would meet weekly and share what they were working on in hopes to gain some insight and ideas from the others. I think my experience was typical in a commercial research environment.

Contrast the approach just described, closed innovation within an industrial organization, to a purely academic exercise from graduate school that was much more successful in exploring a wider range of potential solutions. In a synthetic organic chemistry course, taught at Stanford University and overseen by Professor William S. Johnson, 20 other “generally-accepted-as-swift” chemists and I were assigned one molecule each week. Our job was to design an appropriate synthesis for that substance, that is, ways to make the molecules much like the ones I would later be making in my work assignments. We were not asked to actually conduct the synthesis in the laboratory but to support each of our recommended steps with precedents from the scientific literature. This was, essentially, no different from the first steps I would later take in the synthesis challenges I faced as an employee. These weekly homework assignments were not simple problems. Each assignment required 20 to 80 hours of effort, and students generally dropped all other coursework while this one class was taken. Papers were turned in on Monday, and that Wednesday a special evening class was held, which often extended into the wee hours of the morning. (more…)

We recently announced the publication of The Open Innovation Marketplace, written by InnoCentive Founder Alph Bingham and CEO Dwayne Spradlin.  In the post below, Alph Bingham shares his thoughts on Challenge Driven Innovation.

Business processes make companies smart. They are one of the primary means for archiving and retrieving institutional knowledge. They are what allows Boeing to build a plane or Pfizer to launch a drug — when in all likelihood NO one employee of any company knows what it takes to accomplish those tasks. But in spite of enabling this almost magical quality of collective knowledge, business processes also make companies dumb. They can archive and institutionalize modes of behavior no longer relevant. They all have a “discard by” date, but too few get discarded on time.

Many of the current business processes related to innovation were forged before the world became “connected.” They assumed a reality that ceased to exist as we rolled into a new century. New innovation processes need to be hung on an innovation architecture that reflects a world where knowledge is fluid, where connections are fast and where outcome transcends geography. Corporate innovation practices assume a closed system — or at least one that is predominately so. Leaders have read much and talked much about the new era of open innovation but how many have rewritten their business innovation processes, how many have changed their metrics for innovation success and how many have gone back and redefined the gate criteria separating the stages of their innovation cycle?

Innovation is risky business. And to manage those risks, project gating criteria are selected that prevent an overabundance of false positives. That is to say that projects likely to fail are periodically reviewed and terminated before they burn too many resources and too much cash. But if those expenses were shared by a partner or better by a network, such terminations would in most instances be premature. (more…)

Anjai Lal and Sahsa Vyash are the the winners of the third Economist-InnoCentive Challenge, The Economist-InnoCentive Entrepreneurship Challenge. They presented their winning plan at The Economist’s Ideas Economy: Innovation Event on March 23-24 in Berkeley, CA. This blog post is by Anjai.

I am currently a second year MBA student at the Yale School of Management. I graduated from Indian Institute of Technology in 2006 with a major in Electrical Engineering. Thereafter, I worked with British Telecom as a consultant where I was primarily involved in strategy and planning. At BT, I held a cross functional profile that spanned around Crisis Management, Strategy, Technology, Finance and Project and Vendor Management. I am passionate about the telecom/technology sector and am extremely interested in the emerging markets. I will graduate from Yale School of Management in May, 2011.

At Yale, my interests lie in Strategy, Finance and Technology. I spent the last summer with Zephyr Management, a Private Equity fund in NYC. I also interned with IBM in Business Performance Services. I head the South Asian Business Forum at the School of Management and am also a member of the organizing team of Asia Tomorrow- Yale’s premier student run conference. (more…)

Some of you may have noticed elsewhere an announcement regarding the recent publication of “The Open Innovation Marketplace” by myself, InnoCentive co-founder,  Alph Bingham, and InnoCentive CEO, Dwayne Spradlin.  We wanted to communicate directly with you about this bit of news because you are an integral part of it.  In this book, we often reference you and your contributions as we speak of a Solver population and the amazing capabilities of that network, punctuated with a few concrete examples.

But let’s back up and make clear that this book is not and was not intended to be “The InnoCentive Story.”  Not that such a book shouldn’t be written — just that, this is not it.  As Dwayne and I point out in the Afterword, “…there were a few areas …that we could not address sufficiently in the book. First was the desire to tell InnoCentive’s story from its founding to the present—and forward, to what might come next. Indeed the story is like no other, and is one that we love to tell … (and another missing piece) was the call for many more case studies telling the amazing stories of InnoCentive’s Solvers and their ingenuity and dedication in finding solutions to problems.  … there is no doubt that we are at the center of a hotbed of activity that is shattering all the prior notions of how innovation happens, how organizations should access and manage talent, and why people do what they do. We observe and facilitate unbelievably inspiring stories of the power of crowds to do everything from accelerating industrial research, to imagining new business opportunities, to accelerating cures for neglected diseases.”

But of course the experiences of InnoCentive and the impressive stories of Solvers could not be neglected altogether, and we point out in the preface that:  “As executives of InnoCentive, we have used our own business as a laboratory (italics added) for understanding open processes and for examining the way innovation is practiced by ourselves and our many customers and partners…” (more…)