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.

(more…)

Clearly, we will be reviewing the chain of events, doing post mortems, and second guessing for a long time to come all the events before during, and after the oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. There will be many points of view and they will differ greatly based upon your perspective. Corporations’ views will differ from environmentalists, lawyers’ will differ from engineers. And Gulf States inhabitants may have very different views than those from the Beltway in Washington D.C.

One area of focus will undoubtedly be whether we used all the tools at our disposal to respond to the crisis quickly and effectively. One might ask “Why wouldn’t we?” In reality, the discussion needs to be “What prevented us from doing so?”

More to come in later blog posts, but for now I thought it would be an opportune time to share some early reflections related to this oil crisis on this topic from my point of view. In particular, as we worked to energize problem solvers from all over the world to drive solutions for BP and the oil spill cleanup efforts, we and the world more broadly found it very difficult to pierce the corporate veil at BP to provide assistance. Even when BP provided vehicles for suggestions to be considered, it was clear that this was not a primary strategy. Most were not process, and frankly, the world was never given the transparency or tools by BP to fully participate in the process in the first place. Why was this so difficult and what can we learn? (more…)

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

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

As attempts to stem the flow of oil from the broken well in the Gulf of Mexico continue to fail, the intensity of media attention has increased.  At the same time, our Solvers continue to rise to the challenge and submit thoughtful and novel solutions to the problem.  Last night, InnoCentive CEO Dwayne Spradlin spoke with Hardball’s Chris Matthews about some “out of the box” ideas we’ve seen from our Solvers – and about the need for those in charge to start looking very seriously at what our Solver community has to offer.

Last week, InnoCentive hosted a webinar with Chris Andrews, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, Inc., called Improving The Management and Measurement of Innovation.  We had more than 300 attendees for this session, and, during the Q&A, many more questions than Chris could answer.  Chris has kindly provided responses to the questions that he didn’t have time to answer on the call. 

Q&A Session for Improving the Management and Measurement of Innovation, by Chris Andrews, Forrester Research

Some at my company have talked about “incremental innovation.” Sounds like an oxymoron to me … a euphemism for process improvement.  Am I being too cynical?

I think you have a good point, but the ability to create incremental innovation is actually an important part of business life.  Not all of us can hit home runs every day we go to work, so sometimes we have to be happy to hit singles and doubles – things that create innovation within our companies and for our clients that don’t necessarily re-invent our business.  We can see countless examples of innovations, particularly in the consumer product space, that have substantially improved upon old products without fundamentally changing their value.

I think your point highlights something important: there’s a pretty fine line between business-as-usual product improvements and real innovation, and it’s important not to confuse the two.

Who or which functional group should lead the innovation effort? Should there be leader(s) or is organic/dispersed the way to go? Is there a “best” model? ­­
(more…)