Perspectives on Innovation

We recently posted a Challenge with the Consumer Electronics Association and the Environmental Defense Fund as part of our EDF/InnoCentive EcoChallenge Series.  The Challenge seeks financially viable, environmentally-beneficial business models based on the repurposing of recycled Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) glass from used televisions and computer monitors.  We spoke with Walter Alcorn, Vice President of Environmental Affairs for the Consumer Electronics Association about the Challenge and the importance of solving this critical environmental issue.

Hi Walter – thanks for agreeing to talk with our Solvers today.  Your Challenge, New Uses for Recycled Glass, specifically calls for new uses for CRT screens, once the standard for televisions and other types of monitors.  How big a problem is used CRT glass for the environment?

The disposition of used CRT glass is a serious resource conservation and recovery issue.  Although used CRT glass is inert while still intact as old TV and monitor tubes, CRT glass contains a significant amount of lead that could be released into the environment if processed inappropriately or mismanaged.

Safe recycling is a big deal for my industry – the consumer electronics industry. Last April we announced the eCycling Leadership Initiative with an ambitious Billion Pound Challenge to more than triple the amount of electronics recycled annually by our industry from 300 million pounds in 2010 to one billion in 2016.

These billions of pounds of recycled electronics need to be recycled responsibly and the materials put back into productive use.  By weight, more than half of all collected consumer electronics are old televisions and computer monitors, and the heaviest component of most of those products are CRTs. For decades, CRT was the technology of choice in the display industry but during the past decade, demand for CRTs has dropped drastically as newer flat-panel technologies like LCD and plasma have become affordable and widely available. Until now most CRT glass collected for recycling was cleaned up and recycled into new CRT units, but the market for new CRT displays is now nearly gone.  Uses for CRT glass with lead (e.g., funnel glass) is particularly challenging.

Why did you choose to pose this Challenge to the InnoCentive Solver Network?

We needed raise the visibility of this situation beyond the recycling industry.  New applications for CRT glass, and potentially new processing technologies are needed to appropriately recycle this material.  We are excited about the encouraging response from the Solver community with more than 250 project rooms opened in the first 2 weeks.   Hopefully this is a sign that economically and environmentally viable uses for CRT glass truly exist.

What will you do with the solution once it has been selected? Are you hoping to take it forward and would you consider working with the Solver to further develop the solution? (more…)

This week, InnoCentive announced that is has become a General Services Administration (GSA) Schedule contractor. Essentially what this means is that it is now easier for U.S. federal government agencies to engage with InnoCentive to develop and launch Challenges.

As many of our Solvers know, we’ve done some pretty interesting work with the government. In January 2010, NASA’s Johnson Space Center launched an open innovation pavilion on InnoCentive.com. Of NASA’s initial seven Challenges – ranging from protecting astronauts and equipment in space from solar flares to keeping food fresh during long space missions – nearly 3,000 of our Solvers from around the world participated, and more than 350 solutions were proposed. NASA designated full or partial monetary awards for all seven Challenges, and the average time-to-solution for each of the Challenges was only four months.

I always liked this quote from Solver Yury Bodrov, who was rewarded for his submission to NASA’s Improved Food Packaging Challenge: “I was not sure I would be successful, but having NASA scientists evaluate my work was a primary motivation…It is a dream to be recognized by the scientific level of NASA quality.” 

More recently, in March 2011, InnoCentive and the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) announced a collaboration to advance innovation in military research. Through this partnership, the AFRL has successfully solved Challenges, including methods for dropping humanitarian aid without injury to people on the ground and stopping a fleeing vehicle without damaging the vehicle or the driver. The AFRL has since launched new Challenges, most recently Fast Rope Glove Device, currently open to the public and seeks innovative ways for military personnel to descend quickly from a helicopter in hostile situations.

Let’s face it: While we consider all of our Challenges to be important, there’s something cool about participating in NASA, AFRL, and other Challenges posted by government agencies. They spark our collective imaginations and enable us to truly reach for the stars. Stay tuned for other agencies to launch new Challenges on InnoCentive.com in the coming months.

Yesterday we announced our collaboration with Popular Science to stimulate worldwide interest in science and technology innovation. The collaboration includes the Popular Science Innovation Pavilion as the destination for a variety of Challenges tailored to engineers, architects, scientists and technologists—as well as the garage tinkerers and basement inventors.  In addition, Popular Science and InnoCentive have launched a Challenge to find a better way to teach science to school children.  Earlier this week, Popular Science’s West Coast Bureau Chief Jacob Ward blogged about this Challenge – an excerpt from his blog is below.  The entire article is available here.

Introducing the Popular Science/InnoCentive Education Challenge

It’s time to get the next generation of scientists thinking about what’s important, and you can help. Below are five education challenges chosen by the editors of Popular Science in partnership with InnoCentive, an open-innovation and crowdsourcing firm. We invite you to devise a simple lesson plan for one or more of them. Each plan should be directed at middle-school students, involve at most three 50-minute sessions, and require less than $50 in materials. The most engrossing, informative and easily replicated approach in each area will earn you a cash reward—and the chance to see your work implemented in classrooms across the country. Visit our Open Innovation Pavilion to register.

Read the rest of the article here.

Today we announced a new collaboration with the world renowned Cleveland Clinic, to advance medical and healthcare innovation.  The cornerstone of the partnership is the Cleveland Clinic Medical Innovation Pavilion, which will be home to a series of Challenges aimed at providing new advances in patient care.  Dr. Paul DiCorleto, Ph.D., Sherwin-Page Chair of the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute, led the initiative from the Cleveland Clinic side, bringing together a team of basic and clinical researchers with the aim of reaching outside of the traditional innovation process to uncover new ideas that could change the way the world approaches medical research.  We asked Dr. DiCorleto to give us his thoughts about the partnership and the role of open innovation in health care.

Hello Dr. DiCorleto, and thank you for speaking with us today. Can you tell us a bit about Cleveland Clinic and the mission of the Lerner Research Institute?

Cleveland Clinic is unique in that from its very beginning in 1921, the founders believed that research and education belonged with clinical care.  These elements remain in our mission statement today, and research is viewed as an integral part of patient care.  At the Lerner Research Institute, our goal is to understand the underlying causes of human diseases and to develop new treatments and cures.

Cleveland Clinic is a world renowned research institute.  Can you tell us about some of the specific innovations that have been developed since the organization’s founding? (more…)

Today, InnoCentive and Popular Science are pleased to announce that we’ve joined forces and will be offering our Solvers and Popular Science’s audience of readers a new opportunity to engage in open innovation with the Popular Science Pavilion, to be launched in May of this year.  The potential of combining our global network of over 250,000 Solvers and Popular Science’s audience of passionate, creative and curious readers is something we’re very excited about.  We asked Jacob Ward, West Coast Bureau Chief of Popular Science magazine and the Bonnier Technology Group, to share his thoughts on what the partnership will mean for Popular Science.

To look back through the archives of Popular Science magazine is to read the history of innovation. Our magazine was founded in 1872. We’ve published writing by Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur and Isaac Asimov. We’ve covered the invention of everything from the telephone to the cell phone.

The common thread among all these stories is that individuals, or small groups, identified new scientific or technical challenges and came up with solutions to them. And to look across the breadth of the challenges we’ve covered, the fact that an individual or single institution managed to solve them is astounding.

In the May 1949 issue of Popular Science, our writers covered the struggle to get out of Earth’s gravitational pull. In the February 1959 issue, we wrote about the challenge of building aluminum car engines that would do away with the heft of iron or steel parts without, well, catching fire. And in the January 1981 issue we covered the attempt to create a single-blade turbine system for windmills—an effort to simplify construction that in the end produced too much noise and not enough power.

All of these projects obeyed what is soon to be an outdated mode of innovation. Each project involved a very narrow and isolated path from challenge to solution: one person bumps into the problem, and he or she develops, alone or with the help of their coworkers or friends, a solution.

But now the rise of technology has allowed us to reinvent that model. Popular Science is now able to actually facilitate—through our new pavilion, powered by InnoCentive and the power of distributed networks—the innovations that drive the future.

Imagine how different the history of innovation might have been if the people identifying the challenges could have posted a public call for solutions. Those rocket scientists who invented the step-rocket system of jettisoned boosters might have put out a call for ideas and pursued another line of thinking. The space program might have gone to the moon via some other form of propulsion entirely. The car companies that struggled mightily and expensively to create a self-cooling aluminum engine could have been saved the engine-fire headaches of the 1970s if they’d been able to ask the thinking public to solve the problem for them. And the wind-turbine industry could have created an inexpensive and enduring prototype for harvesting wind energy as early as 1980, using the designs of some garage tinkerer who’d been toying with windmills on his own.

The Popular Science pavilion will be a place for companies, universities, think-tanks, government agencies and other institutions to put their hardest and most critical problems in front of our enormous audience of amateur inventors, professional researchers and everyday dreamers. We’re confident that adding those readers to InnoCentive’s global Solver community will allow even more problems to be solved. And in the process, Popular Science won’t just be covering another innovation—it will have helped, in some way, to provide it.