Perspectives on Innovation

By Dwayne Spradlin, CEO, InnoCentive

I recently attended NASCAR Racing School as a birthday present from my family. And it was an incredible experience. In the midst of the searing Texas heat, I was given several hours of instruction on both the car and the rules of the road. Somehow, Texas Motor Speedway looks less daunting on television than when you’re sitting in an actual racing car. Did I call it a car? My mistake. It is a rocket engine with a steering wheel. And the banked areas of the track have a much more severe incline than you could imagine. I must say that even though I pride myself on being even keeled, my heart was pounding.

The highlight of the school is taking several laps around the track at whatever top speed you feel comfortable with. In reality, you follow an experienced driver, so when you are ready to go faster, you signal to the car in front of you by coming within a few yards of their car, which is the sign to accelerate – both terrifying and invigorating at 140 MPH (not actually sure why a headset isn’t a better idea).

I grew up learning to drive near Chicago and I assure you, I-94 is not sufficient coursework for being a NASCAR driver. Although it felt like an eternity, I was driving on the roadway for less than 30 minutes. My top speed? Just under 150 miles per hour, not even close to the speeds professionals must manage every day. This was the adrenaline rush of a lifetime!

Adrenaline or not, stepping on the gas was not a natural act. Every fiber of your being senses danger because, in your head, you know that man should not be going this fast. There was an ever present fear that something bad was right around the next bend. Self-preservation and fear of the unknown are hard to overcome because they are instinct. Professional drivers must have a certain skill set, including a level of fearlessness.

The same is true of change agents within organizations. They know that the organization conforms to a certain set of rules. The safety margins are built in and the performance of the vehicle is well understood. Standard operation procedures, culture and management systems ensure that; employees follow their “experienced drivers” to reach a desired destination at their comfortable speed. To go outside that comfort zone is to take an organization into new territory, to push the comfort level. Suggesting an organization can deliver higher performance levels is suggesting that current systems are inadequate. Pulling ahead puts you right in the sights of all the other cars on the track, signaling to all the spectators that those other cars are falling behind. And those other cars are not going to exit the track. They are going to fight to keep things just as they were. Although challenging the status quo within an organization may not feel life threatening, it may feel career threatening. (more…)

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.”)

Last week, InnoCentive Solver Corinne LeBuhan presented her winning solution to the Economist Human Potential Index Challenge at the Economist Human Potential conference in New York. In honor of the event, we reached out to a few Solvers and asked them to send us a video of themselves, talking about what it means to them to be Solvers, and asking them to define “Human Potential”.  The video was shown during InnoCentive CEO Dwayne Spradlin’s presentation at the conference.   Enjoy!

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.

Recently Alph Bingham presented a short but impactful “Flash of Genius” session at the Economist Ideas Economy: Information event in Santa Clara.  In his speech, he draws the distinction between searching data and searching wisdom.  Taken to the next level, how do you find the uniquely prepared mind, who can answer your question only if you ask it at the right moment?  Using the classic story of Archimedes and the bathtub, Alph illustrates how asking the right question at the right time can mean the difference between “it’s not possible” and “Eureka!” View the video in its entirety below.