Perspectives on Innovation

As we turn the page on 2011 and turn our eyes to 2012, I wanted to reflect on some of the remarkable things we accomplished together this past year.

In 2011, we added many thousands of people to our Global Solver Community.  We distributed more than $2m in Challenge awards.  And we welcomed Popular Science and EDF as strategic partners, resulting in a wealth of new Challenges for Solvers to tackle and an expanded pool of diverse minds for our Seekers to tap into.  We elevated Novel Molecule Compound (NMC) Challenges, providing higher award amounts and introducing fingerprinting technology, which resulted in greater uptake in Solver engagement and renewed confidence from our Seekers, ultimately leading to a doubling of NMC Challenges posted and solved as compared to 2010.

But we did something much more important. We accomplished the goal we set for ourselves when we embarked on this journey together – and I don’t say this lightly – we changed the world.  Together we brought solutions to light that would never have been uncovered any other way.  Below are a few of the Challenges that were awarded in 2011 that I’m particularly proud of.

Prize4Life – this was our “walk on the moon” Challenge.  The big, audacious goal that we weren’t sure was even achievable, but was so important that it carried a $1m award.  First launched in 2006, the Prize4Life Challenge sought a biomarker for ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease – a rare disease with such a rapid rate of advancement that there was literally no way to measure its progression.   In 2011, Solver Seward Rutkove was awarded the full $1m for his biomarker, which used a method called electrical impedance myography (EIM)  to measure the flow of a small electrical current through muscle tissue.  This biomarker has the potential to reduce the cost of Phase II clinical trials by more than 50%, and by correlating closely with disease progression, to remove one of the primary obstacles to industry investment in potential ALS therapies.

EDF Nitrate Capture System – PhD candidate Patrick Fuller submitted an innovative solution for the capture of toxic nitrates – and won the award on his first Challenge.  This solution could mitigate the 50-80% of fertilizer applied to commercial crops in the U.S. that is not absorbed by plants and is instead lost to water and air, causing dangerous environmental and health impacts in a growing number of watersheds around the country.

Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Games for Health – anyone who has cared for a chronically sick child knows the challenges that adolescence brings.  The increasing need for independence and social interaction makes following a prescribed health regimen difficult.  Cincinnati Children’s Hospital came up with a unique approach to inspire teenagers and pre-teens to take care of themselves – a video game.  The solution to this Challenge has the potential to dramatically improve health care outcomes for sick kids.  We’ll have more news on this solution in the coming weeks.

Humanitarian Air Drop – The Challenges posted by the Air Force Research Labs have truly captured the attention of our Solvers and of the media.  Of the seven posted so far, the humanitarian air drop Challenge hits closest to home for me.  The notion that distribution of aid to the most vulnerable communities, often in the middle of a war zone, could actually cause harm to people needing that aid, is difficult to accept.  Two Solvers, one from Indonesia and one from Peru, solved the Challenge, one of them referencing a well-known mechanism for moving coal from a mine shaft.  This is a perfect example of diversity and the uniquely prepared mind at work, as my colleague and InnoCentive Co-Founder Alph Bingham might say.

These Challenges represent just a few of the highlights of 2011.  The year 2012 is positioned to be even more impactful – we’ll be awarding new delivery options for the polio vaccine, better sanitation for billions of people in developing countries, and viable disposal options for environmentally toxic electronics.  Over the coming weeks and months we’ll be posting new Challenges that promise to be just as interesting, fulfilling, and earth shattering as those we saw in 2011.

Thank you for your continued participation in the InnoCentive Solver Community.

Warmest regards,
Dwayne

Please join us on Tuesday, December 13th at 2:00pm EST for “Harness the Global Talent Pool to Accelerate Innovation” a free webinar featuring Braden Kelley, industry thought leader and co-founder of innovationexcellence.com

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

How some of the most well-known companies manage their open innovation efforts

Why having a talent network strategy is becoming increasingly important; and

How to utilize open innovation and crowdsourcing resources to drive your business.

We recently announced the launch of an exciting new Challenge series with BeyondPolio, an initiative of the Jonas Salk Legacy Foundation and the investment firm Spencer Trask to help support the global eradication of polio. Though rare in the Western world today, wild polioviruses are still circulating in a few remaining countries in Asia and Africa, where more than 1,000 new cases of paralytic polio are diagnosed each year.  The initial Challenge in the series Increasing the Affordability of Inactivated Poliovirus Vaccine in Low- and Middle-income Countries, seeks novel ideas to significantly reduce the cost of using IPV in countries where it is currently unaffordable.  The solution to this Challenge will form the basis for a series of larger Challenges, aimed at helping to eradicate polio completely and maintain success once eradication is achieved.  We asked Dr. Peter Salk, President of the Jonas Salk Legacy Foundation, to give us some background about the state of polio eradication and this Challenge series.

Hi Peter, and thank you for speaking with us today.  Your Challenge aims to help close the final chapter on eradicating polio.  People may be surprised to learn that polio is still a problem in some parts of the world.  Can you tell us why it has been so difficult to rid the world of this disease?

Let me give you some background so that an answer to this question will make sense.

Polio has been around for a long time (an Egyptian stele from around 1400 BC shows a man with the typical signs of a leg paralyzed by polio).  The disease became a huge problem in the early part of the last century when improvements in sanitation meant that children were not exposed to polioviruses while still protected by antibodies from their mothers.  As a result, large scale epidemics took place, the worst of which in the U.S. occurred in 1952 when nearly 58,000 individuals — mostly children — were paralyzed or died.

With the development of the inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV), which entered use in 1955, and then the live attenuated oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV), which was initially deployed between 1959-1963, it became possible to envision eradicating polio completely.  This goal is feasible since humans are the only natural hosts for polioviruses — unlike influenza, for example, which is carried by many other animal species.

A Global Polio Eradication Initiative, spearheaded by Rotary International, WHO, the CDC and UNICEF, was undertaken beginning in 1988, relying primarily on the use of OPV, which is inexpensive and easy to administer.  Since the start of that campaign, the number of cases of paralytic polio caused by wild polioviruses has fallen from approximately 350,000 cases per year around the world to fewer than 2,000 cases a year over the last decade.  That’s a decrease of over 99%.

Why did you decide to post your Challenge to the InnoCentive Solver network?

The BeyondPolio program is the brainchild of Kevin Kimberlin, Chairman of Spencer Trask & Co., the investment firm that is helping carry out the BeyondPolio initiative in conjunction with the Jonas Salk Legacy Foundation.  Kevin had played a major role in the HIV vaccine project my father had devoted himself to in the last years of his life, and he and my father had a close and meaningful relationship.  The idea for using InnoCentive as part of the BeyondPolio initiative derived from Spencer Trask’s familiarity with InnoCentive as a result of having helped with its initial financing, and from Spencer Trask’s awareness of the track record of effectiveness of InnoCentive’s Challenge Driven Innovation programs.  The InnoCentive platform appeared to be a good way to get the word out to a large number of creative and intelligent “Solvers”, and it seemed well-suited for BeyondPolio’s series of Challenges.

OK, so if the eradication program reduced the number of cases of polio in the world caused by wild polioviruses by 99%, that means there still is another 1% of the way to go.  Why has it been so hard to get the job finished over the last 10 years?

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By David Sample, Executive Vice President, Sales and Marketing, InnoCentive

I’m a road warrior.  I’ve spent a career expanding businesses to remote corners of the world and have been fortunate to discover innovation and intellectual curiosity in the most unexpected of places.  From the rain forests of Brazil to the deserts of Dubai, I’ve learned that we all share a need to solve problems.  We all want to make our worlds better.  And we all want to connect with others who challenge us.

This is why joining InnoCentive has been so fulfilling for me.  As Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing, I’m tasked with expanding our global footprint to increase the innovation capacity of organizations around the world.  This means not only ensuring that our Solver network comprises a diverse mix of individuals from as many different backgrounds as possible, but also providing problems for our Solvers to work on that reflect issues they may not have encountered before.

Over the past few months, we’ve been actively formalizing partnerships to help us extend our reach in strategic geographies.   In Q2, we selected Innovabia, an Arabian Advanced Systems company, to help us bring new Seekers onboard in the Middle East and North Africa. Innovabia is headquartered in Dubai, UAE, and Riyadh, KSA, and has a deep understanding of the business needs in this area. We participated in a formal kick off with our first corporate KSA client, SABIC at an Innovabia/AAS hosted reception and dinner in Riyadh.  InnoCentive CEO Dwayne Spradlin, pictured at the event, pledged a dual effort to expand the Solver and Seeker communities in the region.

Also in Q2, Innovia joined forces with InnoCentive as a partner in South America. Headquartered in Brazil, they will work to expand the Seeker and Solver presence in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil.  In Q3, InnoCentive helped kick off a new partnership in Colombia by participating in an Innovation Day, sponsored by our partner, Tecnova. Over 750 people attended the event and were very enthusiastic about the address given by InnoCentive’s VP of Government Jon Fredrickson. Tecnova will provide solutions throughout Colombia and Peru. (more…)

(Open Innovation)²

by Christian Stevenson, Innovation Program Manager, InnoCentive

In a unique implementation of our own methodology, we recently posted a Challenge in conjunction with one of our Seeker clients to use open innovation to improve the utility of open innovation. While we have sponsored Challenges on our own website in the past, this is the first time that we have turned the lens of our Solver community onto some of the key issues that we face in our daily business.  The Challenge asks Solvers to:

1. Quantitatively establish the benefits of open innovation, and

2. Provide key business decision-makers with better tools to track and implement open innovation within their business.

In addition to offering an award of $30,000 for a solution to this Challenge, both InnoCentive and our Seeker client would welcome collaborative work with winning Solver(s) to further refine and potentially implement their solution. For those interested in more information on this Challenge, the overview of the Challenge can be viewed here.