Perspectives on Innovation

Greetings Solvers–

I’m curious about the low usage of our Solver Forum and I’m writing today to draw your attention to it and ask you to visit and give your input.

First, did you realize there is a Solver Forum on the IC website, which is there for your use? You can use it to express a view, connect with other Solvers, or to connect with IC.

Now I’ll be the first to admit, in the age of rampant social media technologies, it’s a slim offering today, but we’re looking at building it out around the Solver Community’s needs. I’d love to know if and how you use forums and other social media. Leave me a comment here or post your thoughts on the forum.

Second,  I posted a note on the forum last week about one of our current open challenges (InnoCentive Solver Community Visualization Tool, Challenge ID: 9543015). Check it out–Solvers are working on the challenge right now, and they could use your input. Maybe you even want to open a project room.

Thanks!

JD

Today’s guest post is provided by InnoCentive Top Solver Harvey Arbesman, and his wife Marian Arbesman.  Harvey won the Discovery Prize and the Thought Prize in the Prize4Life ALS Challenge. Harvey and Marian are innovation consultants who in 2002 founded ArbesIdeas, Inc., a research and consulting company devoted to innovation in the life sciences.  They’ll be contributing to this blog from time to time as part of our “Help a Solver Succeed” series.  Harvey and Marian’s previous post, A Systematic Approach to Defining the Challenge for a Winning Solution, can be found here.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

Albert Einstein

Maps are amazing – whether one is taking a trip or trying to locate a specific store in the mall, maps can help you find out where you are, and the best way to get where you are trying to go. In addition, by stepping back from the details of the map, you can understand the big picture of the journey you are taking.

Mapping is also very useful during the process of understanding a Challenge that you are trying to solve. Plotting the relationships among various factors involved in a Challenge can help establish clarity regarding the problem. It also stretches one’s thinking and promotes the development of new thought patterns and connections between established areas. (more…)

Several weeks ago, Leapfactor posted a Challenge seeking ideas for using mobile alerts and approvals within SAP.  Leapfactor would like to provide Solvers who are working on this Challenge with a bit of input that might be helpful when submitting a solution.

The following was originally posted on the SAP Ecosystem blog.

Here’s an update to Leapfactor’s and SAP’s Ideation Challenge:

Three weeks after launch, there are nearly 300 “Project Rooms” tackling this Challenge. Perhaps the real challenge is to NOT find an opportunity for our micro apps!

Last week, we hosted a couple of webinars and we were able to hear live from Solvers who had some great questions.   We wanted to share with you some of the output of those meetings. (more…)

Today’s guest post is provided by winning InnoCentive Solver  Harvey Arbesman, and his wife Marian Arbesman.  Harvey won the Discovery Prize and the Thought Prize in the Prize4Life ALS Challenge. Harvey and Marian are innovation consultants who in 2002 founded ArbesIdeas, Inc., a research and consulting company devoted to innovation in the life sciences.  They’ll be contributing to this blog from time to time as part of our “Help a Solver Succeed” series.

“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody else has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought.” Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

What’s your vision for solving a Challenge?  Before you start working on a new project, how do you imagine yourself tackling the Challenge? Some people may imagine themselves struggling and toiling away in the middle of the night, while others see themselves walking along a windswept beach waiting for the moment when a great solution seems to come out of nowhere.  I’d like to share with you our approach for taking on and defining new Challenges, one that combines a variety of proven techniques for increasing innovation. While we may not be able to help you get around working in the middle of the night, and we definitely can’t provide the beach, we can help you with a streamlined and systematic approach that can take away some of the angst of finding new solutions and hopefully even make it fun.

The InnoCentive Solver community is enormous and diverse. Not only are Solvers found all over the world, but also they come from many different disciplines and have varying levels of expertise solving complex problems. This blog targets many different kinds of Solvers:  people interested in solving a problem who need some help to get started; those who have previously submitted solutions (and maybe even won), but would like some help making it happen more quickly; and those who are novices in a given area and need some ideas for how to get started. (more…)

Hello Readers!  I am writing to tell you about some exciting news from the Client Services group at InnoCentive.

Just last week we launched an exciting new Challenge entitled Predictive Data Analysis. This $100,000 Challenge asks Solvers from all backgrounds to build a predictive model based on a complex dataset.  I know, $100,000 on its own makes this Challenge quite special. But, there is another really cool feature that’s so noteworthy – The Prodigy. This website feature allows enables Solvers to get instant feedback on how well they’re doing in comparison to other Solvers.  Sound exciting? Let me tell you a bit more.

First, a bit of background. The Predictive Data Analysis Challenge asks Solvers to build a model using a large dataset in order to estimate the relative performance of various breeds of an organism.  We have provided the molecular and performance data on 100 breeds of the organism and ask Solvers to estimate the relative performance of an independent set of 150 breeds based on their molecular data.  The Prodigy allows Solvers to upload the relative ordering of the breeds and then it will instantly be compared to the known answer provided to InnoCentive by the Seeker.  After submitting, the Prodigy will provide Solvers with their score, their ranking and if they are within the top 10 best submitted scores thus far, their username will appear on the leader’s table.

This feature is obviously not amenable to all of InnoCentive’s Challenges. However, we think that it will encourage you to continue if you’re on the right track and to go back to the drawing board if you aren’t!  We recommend that you log into the Predictive Data Analysis Challenge and let us know what you think about the Prodigy. We’d love to hear from you in the comments section below.

Happy Solving and good luck.

Gabriel Eichler
InnoCentive Client Services