Perspectives on Innovation

InnoCentive@Work has been nominated for a Forrester Groundswell Award!  You can vote for our entry on the Groundswell Submissions Page.  In the meantime, read more about InnoCentive’s enterprise offering below:

Introduced in 2008, InnoCentive@Work is the fast, easy and cost-effective way to harness the collective intellectual power of your best and brightest people. It provides an open forum where everyone in your organization is encouraged to collaborate on your most pressing organizational challenges via a secure, easy-to-use web-based portal. It rewards individuals from anywhere in your company for their contributions toward solving your most pressing problems. And it gives you the ability to unleash breakthrough innovations designed to drive growth and profitability – in less time and for less money than you ever thought possible.

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Greetings, InnoCentive Solvers—

Quick note to inform you that we’ve posted two new Emergency Response 2.0 Challenges around the Gulf Oil Spill disaster: Emergency Response 2.0: Oil Detection on Ocean Surfaces; and Emergency Response 2.0: Oil Collection in Gulf of Mexico.

Innovative solutions to these Challenges will help the organizers and crews clean the water and beaches in the short and medium terms.

For the Oil Detection on Ocean Surfaces Challenge we’re looking for new ways to improve the conventional imaging processes that are currently being deployed, i.e., satellite radar, visual, LIDAR, etc. We are also looking for ways to improve aerial tools aboard helicopters and aircrafts, and, to a lesser degree, surface spotting techniques.

For the Oil Collection in the Gulf of Mexico Challenge we’re looking for commercially available equipment, technology and ideas that would enable the rapid conversion of commercial vessels (e.g., fishing) into oil recovery units.

On the back-end, a board of advisers, currently being assembled, will review the submissions from both Challenges.

That said we also want to take advantage of the perspectives, skills, and talents in the InnoCentive network. In order to accomplish that, we have activated the discussion board within the project rooms.

Please take a look as soon as you can.

Best,

JD

We recently posted a piece about Dwayne Spradlin’s participation in The Economist’s The World in 2010 Event.  One of the commenters on this piece pointed us to a video created by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Enterprise and Industry.  The video is a charming illustration of, literally, breaking down fences in communication and opening new channels of communication to accelerate innovation and problem solving.  Enjoy!

We recently discovered a new web site, Science for Citizens, started by Science Cheerleader founder Darlene Cavalier and her business partner Michael Gold.  The site attracts a wide spectrum of people, who may or may not be “official scientists” but who enjoy working on scientific projects in their spare time.

We love the idea of the citizen scientist – many of these people have the same profile as our Solvers.   And we particularly like this site, because it has such a wide variety of interesting projects, from monitoring water quality in the Willamette River to building habitats for Monarch butterflies to helping build a database of dinosaur bones.  In addition, people who are enthusiastic about their projects are welcome to submit blog posts about any scientific topic that interests them.  Using the “Project Finder,” users can search projects based on time commitment involved, whether the project takes place indoors or outdoors, degree of difficulty – there are even projects that are suitable for children.  The site is still in beta, but we think it’s a great idea – in fact, we even posted one of our Challenges there.   We asked one of the founders, Michael Gold, to tell us a bit more about the project:

Hi Michael.  Thanks for agreeing to talk to us about Science for Citizens.  Can you tell us why you decided to start this site?

There’s a growing interest in science among lay people. Concern is building about science-related societal issues such as the environment, including, of course, global warming. “Science cafes” where researchers discuss their work in an informal setting are popping up around the country. And impressive numbers of people seem inclined to “get their hands dirty” with science, either through recreational activities or full-fledged research projects. To take just a few examples, in the U.S. alone there are 48 million birders, half a million amateur astronomers, and another half a million volunteers who monitor the quality of our waterways. A few years ago when a citizen science project known as “Galaxy Zoo” put out a call for volunteers to analyze telescopic images online, nearly 150,000 people signed up. (more…)

by Steven Telio, Director of Product Management, InnoCentive

In the end, I took a different job.

I’ll also admit that my thinking has evolved since the interview, and I don’t necessarily believe that the RGM metaphor holds together completely, but for the sake of argument…

The interviewer asked, “Who are your role models?”

“Rube Goldberg,” I replied.

The interviewer looked confused. I was interviewing for a position with a consultancy that specialized in solving difficult business problems. She didn’t think I was taking her question seriously. But I was.

Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist and inventor who won a Pulitzer prize in 1948 for his political cartoons. He is best known for a series of cartoons depicting complex machines designed to do simple tasks, a so-called Rube Goldberg Machine, or RGM. The machines are often whimsical, overly complicated and completely contrived, yet they successfully perform the tasks they are designed to do. Some of my favorite real-world examples are OK Go’s latest contraption, and the Honda car commercial “The Cog”.

A well-conceived RGM is a singular example of the art of engineering and science. There is beauty in these machines. More important to me, though, and the reason I brought it up in the interview, is a successful RGM requires an enormous amount of planning, a willingness to adapt as circumstances change, and a certain amount of luck for it to work. And that is a metaphor which directly applies to consistently solving difficult problems. (more…)