Perspectives on Innovation

In 2010 we announced the Global Giveback Challenge Series – an exciting 3 phase partnership with GlobalGiving, a peer-to-peer philanthropy marketplace, and the Rockefeller Foundation to crowdsource solutions to problems facing vulnerable communities.  We are excited to be entering phase 3 of the series:

Phase One: Identify dire problems that could be solved via the InnoCentive Global Solver Community.  Global Giving crowdsourced ideas from its then 800-partner membership.

Phase Two: From the submissions, four water-related Challenges were developed and posted to the InnoCentive Challenge Platform, and awards of up to $40,000 per Challenge were offered by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Phase Three: Crowdfund implementation of the solutions.  The Challenges and their solutions are now posted to GlobalGiving for funding. For the month of February, The Rockefeller Foundation is matching every donation 200%.

More information on each of the projects is below.  This is a rare opportunity to see InnoCentive sourced solutions through to implementation.  To donate to one of these projects, please visit the Global Giveback Funding Challenge page

1. Design of an easy-to-use method to purify water from Lake Victoria in Uganda, making it safe to drink. Proposed by the EDGE project, this Challenge sought a way to provide 100 homes with water filters that would improve upon current filtration systems for the cost of one gallon of bottled water in the developed world. Submitted by Chris Schulz, an environmental engineer from Denver, Colorado, the winning design is simple, low-cost, user-friendly, and effective against almost all bacteria, protozoa, and some viruses. EDGE will assemble and distribute filters to their partner community in Uganda this summer, allowing hundreds of individuals to go about life without fear of intestinal disease and parasites, empowering people to break the bonds of abject poverty.
2. Sunlight/UV-light Dose Indicator. Proposed by Fundacion SODIS in Bolivia, this Challenge sought a visual sign of water that had been exposed to a sufficient dose of sunlight or UV-light for disinfection. A team of four graduate students from the University of Washington developed the winning solution: a solar disinfectant indicator that is self‐contained, self‐powered, low‐cost, durable, and reusable. Composed of off‐the‐shelf components and proven technology, the indicator should withstand a minimum of 10 years of use.
3. Design of a low cost Rainwater Harvesting Storage Tank for a Wetland Region in Kerala India. Proposed by Rainwater for Humanity, this solution was provided by Mario Rosato, who also won an award for his solution to The Economist-InnoCentive Challenge, The Capture of Atmospheric Carbon to Address Global Warming. Rosato proposed a rainwater catchment tank that could be constructed of panels made from bamboo fiber, coconut husks, or other vegetable fiber conglomerated with cement. Implementation of this solution has the potential of reducing the cost of rainwater harvesting by 60 percent.
4. Small-scale River Turbines for communities along the Amazon River. Proposed by Green Empowerment, this Challenge sought a design for a river turbine to generate power for villages, schools, and medical centers in the Amazonian jungle in Peru. Alain Lemyre, a weather forecaster from Quebec, provided the winning design: an improved river turbine model that is appropriate for the region, technically and economically accessible, and constructed with materials available in developing countries.

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We’re very proud to announce that our customer, Prize4Life, was recognized today as the winner in the Life Sciences category for the 2011 Spike Awards.

According to the sponsor of the awards, Kalypso, the “Spike Awards recognize the best use of social strategies, processes, and supporting technologies to improve innovation, product development, and product management…The Awards celebrate forward-thinking innovators that leverage Social Product Innovation across the product lifecycle, including open innovation, crowdsourcing, expert identification, collaboration platforms, social product development and sentiment analysis.”

Our customer, Prize4Life, is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the discovery of treatments and cures for ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. The organization was founded by Avi Kremer, a Harvard Business School student diagnosed with ALS at the age of twenty-nine. In 2006, Prize4Life partnered with InnoCentive to launch the $1 million ALS Biomarker Prize. This Grand Challenge focused on finding a biomarker to measure the progression of ALS in patients, thereby facilitating the cost effective development of treatments by pharmaceutical and biotech companies.

The multi-stage Grand Challenge was launched via InnoCentive.com in 2006 and made available to InnoCentive’s Global Solver Community (which today is a quarter-million strong and growing). In 2007, as part of the first two stages of the Challenge, Prize4Life awarded several ‘thought’ prizes to encourage promising concepts. Of particular note, a dermatologist with no prior ALS experience was recognized and rewarded for applying a skin-elasticity method used in the cosmetic industry. This is a prime example of the importance of diversity in solving problem (and in fact, two-thirds of the teams competing for the prize came from outside the traditional ALS field). In total, partial awards totaling $175,000 went to six groups. In 2009, the third stage of the $1 million Grand Challenge was posted to InnoCentive’s Global Solver Community. Two years later (early 2011), the full $1 million amount was awarded to Dr. Seward Rutkove, a neurologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, for his biomarker discovery.

Dr. Rutkove developed a non-invasive test that measures the flow of a small electrical current through muscle tissue. Electrical current travels differently through healthy and diseased tissue, and by comparing the size and speed of the current, Dr. Rutkove’s method can accurately measure the progression of ALS. While the Grand Challenge process culminated in the identification of a biomarker, the five-year multi-stage Challenge process inspired many new ideas from new thinkers, some of whom had no prior ALS experience. These ideas may yield future promise both inside and outside the field of ALS. In fact, KineMed, a biotech company that was awarded one of the thought prizes, proposed a biomarker that has potential utility in Parkinson’s disease research. Prize4Life connected the company to the Michael J. Fox Foundation, and they are currently working together to develop the technology. In total, nearly 3,000 Solvers and over 100 solutions from dozens of countries were proposed over the course of the Prize4Life Grand Challenge.

“Participating in the challenge helped to refine my thinking,” said Dr. Rutkove. “It led me to apply my technology research specifically to ALS focusing on both the animal studies and device development. In our case, participation has effectively sped the development of a handheld device to sensitively measure disease progression.”

A wonderful story, and some well-deserved recognition for Prize4Life. Congratulations!

(If you’re interested in learning more about Grand Challenges, register to download our latest white paper, “Solving The World’s Toughest Challenges in Grand Fashion.”)

You know crowdsourcing has become mainstream when it is leveraged as a primary tool for selecting sessions and panels at an event/conference. Next year’s South by Southwest (SWSX) conference, an immensely popular event taking place in Austin Texas, features a “panel picker” that enables the crowd to cast a vote for the sessions they would like to see.

We’d like to engage our crowd to vote for a panel featuring the CEOs of  TopCoder and InnoCentive, Jack Hughes and Dwayne Spradlin, along with Jake Ward of Popular Science who will be moderating the panel.

The proposed panel, titled “Open Innovation: Millions of Us Solving Problems,” will discuss how open innovation and crowdsourcing can transform organizations, either through a breakthrough ‘eureka‘ idea or continuous and incremental improvement of a product or service. The panel will discuss what companies from Netflix to NASA to Toyota have gained from putting their biggest Challenges out in front of the general public, and how attendees can do the same. It will also uncover the key issues organizations need to address when incorporating open innovation communities into their own business plans, and how professional problem-solving communities will evolve in the coming years.

Please take a moment to register and vote!

By the way, as I was reading some of the comments on the registration page, I ran across this one from someone named John: “Interesting…crowd-sourced panel picking for a session on open innovation and crowdsourcing. Pretty appropriate I must say.”

We couldn’t agree more John.

I was privileged recently to be asked to participate as a subject matter expert on prizes and prize design for a video with Todd Park, CTO of the US Department of Health and Human Services, as well as others driving prizes within HHS. The video, embedded below, is intended to help educate HHS and all of its departments on the power of prizes as well as to encourage best practices. Todd and his team are taking a bold and sophisticated approach. Supported by President Obama’s Open Government initiative and the reauthorization of the America COMPETES Act this past year, HHS is targeting critical innovation needs, cost effective solutions, improved citizen engagement, and generating important learnings to be shared with other agencies in government adopting these approaches. We look forward to hearing about exciting new challenge and prize based programs coming out of HHS in the coming years!

The HHS website on Challenges and Competitions is an excellent information resource that will be valuable inside and outside of agency.

Last week, InnoCentive’s CEO Dwayne Spradlin participated in an event sponsored by Crowdsortium at the Microsoft New England Research & Development Center (NERD) in Cambridge MA. Crowdsortium bills itself as “a group of crowdsourcing industry practitioners that have self-organized to advance the crowdsourcing industry through best practices, education, data collection and public dialog.”

To a packed audience, Harvard Professor Karim Lakhani delivered a compelling keynote speech on the history and future of crowdsourcing, followed by a panel which included Dwayne, Jeff Howe (who was widely credited with inventing the term “crowdsourcing”), Doron Reuveni (CEO of uTest), and Daniel Sullivan (President of Appswell). Jim Savage, a partner at Longworth Venture Partners, moderated the panel.

The folks at uTest have kindly posted the videos online. Click on a link to view:

     * Keynote: Accessing the Ideas Cloud via Crowdsourcing

     * Panel, part 1: Crowdsourcing Defined

     * Panel, part 2: The Crowdsourcing Business Model & Sweet Spots

     * Panel, part 3: Managing the Crowd & Crowdsourcing Challenges

Many thanks to the Crowdsortium team, as well as the sponsors – Appswell and uTest – for putting on a great event. The InnoCentive team looks foward to participating in future events.