Perspectives on Innovation

By David Ritter, Chief Technology Officer, InnoCentive

To compete in today’s economy, companies must find ways to innovate faster with their current resources. Open innovation (OI) is no longer just an interesting new approach to experiment with – OI is an essential core capability for R&D intensive enterprises. If you rely on innovation to drive your business, and you’re not proficient in OI, you’re at a disadvantage – because many of your competitors are already leveraging the talent and insight available throughout the world.

To help enterprises build this critical capability, we are very excited with the launch of the third generation of our @Work enterprise platform, InnoCentive@Work 3. @Work is InnoCentive’s SaaS offering, bringing the InnoCentive.com Challenge methodology into the organization. It is a web-based suite of tools and services that helps companies utilize the diverse knowledge inside and outside of their organization by creating online communities and facilitating collaboration to solve important business challenges, regardless of where solutions are hiding. (more…)

I’ve spent the last two days at SAP’s TechEd 2008 conference in Las Vegas.  At this gathering of 6,000 enterprise software developers, business process experts, analysts and other IT stakeholders, we launched a strategic partnership aimed at changing the way companies innovate in Computer Science and IT.  I’ll be writing more extensively about this relationship over the coming days, but I wanted to share some initial thoughts right away while they’re fresh.

Participation and engagement in SAP’s online communities has exploded over the last few years.  There are now 1.3 million members in the SAP Developer Network (SDN).  Several other related communities span an additional 500,000+ members.  Taken together as the “SAP Community Network”, this ecosystem is actively helping to  shape SAP’s agenda and success.  Many members are employees at major SAP customers and partners.  The leaders in these communities have a strong voice – on SAP’s site and through their own independent blogs and networks.  It’s been great to have a chance to share our model and vision with them and listen to their input and questions.

Here are some quick takeaways from the event so far:

(more…)

In an excellent posting titled “Building a better collective memory”, Michael Nielsen makes the point that science currently lacks the ‘trust infrastructure’ and incentives necessary for free, unrestricted trading of questions and ideas. Imagine two scientists; each has information that could benefit the other more than it benefits themselves. In an ideal world, they’d exchange this information, and both would be better off. This is the concept of ‘comparative advantage’. Unfortunately, in the real world these scientists:

-Will probably never meet in the first place
-If they should happen to meet, they won’t likely talk about the relevant gaps in their work
-Even if they discuss their needs, they don’t have any basis on which to trust each other enough to engage in collaboration

Michael envisions an ideal “collaboration market” that will enable the open (or at least productive) exchange of ideas. This engendered lots of interesting debate, mostly about why none of the existing collaboration sites, publication archives, and the like are NOT fostering this type of exchange. Since we’ve been thinking about this problem for some time at InnoCentive, I thought I’d share some perspective on what characteristics we believe a collaboration platform needs to be effective.

(more…)

Welcome to my first post as CTO at InnoCentive.  I’m responsible for the planning and development of our products, including the features on our web site.  In my posts I’ll share with you some of the thinking behind our work, give previews of what we’re planning, and ask for your input and feedback. 

We have some significant changes in the works, and I’m really looking forward to the dialog. Most recently, we’ve redesigned the registration system on the site.  You may not have noticed the change, since most users only register once.  But this significant rework is an important indicator of how we think about the user experience on the site.  We wanted to accomplish several things:

- Make it fast and easy to register for the first time.  Basic registration went from a very involved, 4-page process to a single, concise page.

- Reduce login problems.  You can now login with either your username or your email address.  We’ve also made the “lost password” and other help pathways more friendly.

- Allow you to tell us about both your expertise and your other interests. For example, my background is in computer science; I have (at least some) expertise in that field.  I’m also interested in marketing, but I wouldn’t consider myself an expert.  I’d like to have the site recommend challenges to me in both areas. To allow for this, we’ve provided a way for you to express this distinction in your profile.

- Collect information only when needed.  We ask for your contact information only when necessary to validate your electronic approval of a legal agreement, such as when you create a new Project Room.

We feel that the last point is really important.  Whenever we request information, it should be clear to you why we’re asking for it and how we’re going to use it.  If there are areas of the site where you feel this is less than obvious, please let us know.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll begin to introduce a range of new features intended to make InnoCentive.com a more efficient, lively, and interactive place to visit.  Active participation from Solvers will form a major part of the experience.  We hope to see you there soon and often.

David