Perspectives on Innovation

In an effort to improve your InnoCentive experience and get you the answers you need, we have made some upates to our Message Center.

You’ll be able to see the difference when you open your next project room – specifically, a logical division of sent vs. received messages.

To see the new Message Center, click on the Messages Tab or the Messages button on the right side of your project room. You will then be able to view messages for this Challenge from your Inbox or Sent tab. We think you’ll find this interface much easier to use.

As always, we value your feedback – please let us know if there is anything else we can do to enhance your InnoCentive Solving experience!

We recently announced that we would be partnering with Nature Publishing Group (NPG) to offer InnoCentive Challenges to NPG readers and clients.  Today we announced a significant milestone in this partnership, the creation of the nature.com Open Innovation pavilion.  I asked Dan Penny, Head of Business Development for NPG to talk to us about the significance of this relationship.

Hi Dan – thanks for being with us today. We’re very excited about partnering with Nature Publishing Group (NPG).  Can you tell us a bit of the history of NPG?

Nature has a long and illustrious history – it was launched in 1869, just ten years after Darwin’s Origin of Species was published – and indeed the first Nature article was written by a strong advocate of Darwin’s theories, Thomas Huxley. It’s great to work somewhere that has that historical context, and although the world has changed a lot in 140 years, we try to make sure that Nature still maintains its important role in drawing attention to the research that shows us how the world works.
Nature Publishing Group – we know it as NPG – now publishes over 70 journals and also offers online databases and services to our scientist community, including daily news and features from Nature News and our careers service NatureJobs. We’re very excited that just this year, Scientific American became the heart of NPG’s newly-formed consumer media division, meeting the needs of the general public.

Can you tell us why NPG was interested in a partnership with InnoCentive?

NPG is recognised as a company which believes very strongly in being innovative in its own right. I used to work for a consultancy which frequently made mention of NPG’s innovative character, but you have to work here to really see how much innovation is going on. It goes back a long way though – NPG’s original, 140-year-old mission statement talks about providing scientists with the opportunity of discussing “the various Scientific questions which arise from time to time”, and so we’ve developed several innovative services to help our readers do that – including Nature Network, our online networking platform for scientists and Connotea, a file sharing resource which won an award for publishing innovation. So I guess our interest in InnoCentive starts with its potential to nurture innovation.

What do you think is the benefit of the partnership to both the Nature user community and the InnoCentive Solver base?

The NPG partnership with InnoCentive will give our user community the opportunity to exercise their knowledge and expertise in solving problems which are out there, but which have stayed private until now. All scientists would like to see practical uses for their research – InnoCentive provides a greater opportunity for that to happen. We see provision of Challenge information to our readers in the same way as our jobs board – providing our readers with opportunities to develop themselves and, who knows, maybe their careers. The existing InnoCentive Solver base should benefit too – I think NPG’s increased involvement with open innovation will encourage others to accept it as a valid way to do research. We all know that traditional culture can be deeply embedded at large corporations – but hopefully Nature’s activities here will make some companies take notice. (more…)

On June 8^th and 9^th The X PRIZE Foundation, in partnership with BT Global Services, the John Templeton Foundation and the United Nations Office for Partnerships, will host incentive2innovate (i2i) – a two-day conference that will put c-suite executives face-to-face with some of the word’s greatest innovators to discuss two powerful yet underutilized tools: open collaboration and incentive prizes. During a series of intimate sessions, attendees will have an opportunity to build relationships with peers and engage in discussions focused on how open collaboration and incentive prize competitions can be leveraged to create new ideas that will benefit an organization’s bottom line.

Dwayne Spradlin, InnoCentive President and Chief Executive Officer, and Alpheus Bingham, Ph.D, InnoCentive Founder and Board of Directors member, are two of the conference’s featured speakers. Others include Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief, Huffington Post; Filippo Passerini, chief information and global services officer, Procter & Gamble; and Dan Tapscott, Author, “Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation.” Dan Tapscott will deliver the opening keynote speech.

Dr. Peter H. Diamandis, chairman and CEO, The X PRIZE Foundation, joins us to share more about the upcoming conference.

Hi Peter.  Thanks for talking with us today.  Can you tell us, what is the goal for the i2i conference?

The X PRIZE Foundation is a recognized leader in bringing about “radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity.” The i2i conference is an extension of our efforts to create such breakthroughs in the business, government and nonprofit worlds. The conference goal is to showcase and drive dialogue around two powerful yet underutilized tools that can create fundamental breakthroughs within an organization’s walls to positively impact their bottom line performance, the economy and the world.

The X PRIZE Foundation, BT and the John Templeton Foundation have seen first-hand how these tools can be used to bring about radical changes for humanity, spur the development and growth of new industries and generate innovative ideas and technologies from individuals across the globe. We want to increase awareness and usage of these tools within the business, government and nonprofit communities to help them improve the pace, cost and quality of innovation. We’ve brought together a dynamic group of innovators who, through a series of breakout sessions, will do exactly that. (more…)

Earlier this week we announced that Prize4Life had awarded 2 InnoCentive Solvers for their efforts toward finding a biomarker for ALS.  Prize4Life also announced that they would be reposting the Challenge in May, in honor of the organization’s third anniversary.  I asked Melanie Leitner, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer from Prize4Life to talk to us about this Challenge, the submissions they received and their hopes for relaunching the Challenge.

Thanks for talking with us today, Melanie.  Can you tell us why you decided to post this Challenge on InnoCentive’s Marketplace?  How optimistic were you that you would find a solution?

When we first developed the Biomarker Prize in 2006, we wanted a way to draw in a broad, diverse, and international pool of competing teams.  As a brand new, very small organization just establishing itself, we did not have the capacity to conduct the kind of marketing and outreach campaign necessary to reach the audience we were looking to attract. We were looking for a partner with established expertise and existing international networks in the open innovation domain. InnoCentive was an attractive partner for us, particularly given their large pool of international solvers.  We also saw that InnoCentive shared many of Prize4Life goals and values, including wanting to change the world (but being agnostic as to where these new world-changing solutions might come from) and especially being international in focus. We knew that posting a $1 million prize, the largest prize ever posted on InnoCentive, would benefit the great work that both organizations were doing.

When our Scientific Advisory Board first set a 2-year deadline for this prize, we knew it was very ambitious.  After all, it often takes 2 years just to get an NIH grant, and in the same period of time, we were asking researchers to come up with a novel idea, find funding, conduct a patient-based study (with all the regulatory hurdles that entails), and provide us with validated results.  Still, we needed to balance these realities with the realities of ALS: most patients die within 2-5 years of diagnosis, and there is currently only one FDA-approved ALS drug on the market, so the need for an ALS biomarker of disease progression was urgent. We knew we were setting a very high bar, but we also knew that if we handled this prize well, we could accelerate research on a very targeted issue.  Our Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) believed that even though we were setting a very high bar, there was a reasonable likelihood that it could be met in 2 years and given the urgency of the need it was worth taking the risk.

Your Challenge was to find a biomarker for ALS – why did you decide to pay an award if the Challenge hasn’t been solved?

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In September of this year, we announced that a Challenge to create technology for solar-powered wireless routers had been solved. The purpose of this Challenge was to provide marginalized women and children in rural India access to the skills and knowledge needed to escape the sex trade.

The Seeker organization for this Challenge, ASSET India was founded by Ray Umashankar two years ago, with his daughter Nita and his wife Sushila. In the two years since ASSET was founded, the organization has opened several training centers in urban areas in India, where 369 students have been enrolled. Plans for 2009 include two or three more training centers and 600 or more enrolled students. Now with the availability of wireless, solar powered routers, he can reach many more people, including those who live more remote rural areas.

In December, Umashankar was recognized with The Purpose Prize which celebrates and supports “outstanding individuals 60 or older who are producing significant social innovation and accomplishing work of great importance. ”

I recently caught up with Dean Umashankar, to get a status update on the implementation of the wireless router technology, as well as an update on the organization’s plans for the future.

Hello Dean Umashankar. It has been a few months since the solar powered router Challenge was solved – what has ASSET been up to in this time?

ASSET has been busy raising funds to pay for the hardware, student wages and faculty salary. The total budget is $42,000 and so far we have raised $8,000. The two prototypes for the router should be ready and tested by September 2009.

Our partner organizations are eagerly awaiting the deployment of the routers. Once the technology is deployed successfully, we will be able to open several centers in rural India. ASSET has had many requests for setting up centers in small rural towns.

How do you anticipate that this deployment will help expand the ASSET mission?

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