Perspectives on Innovation

We recently posted a Challenge for the LAUNCH initiative, a collaboration among  USAID, Nike, NASA and the U.S. State Department.  This is the second Challenge posed by LAUNCH, but the first posted on InnoCentive.com.  This Challenge is seeking preventive measures to improve the first 20 years of human health via nutrition, exercise and diagnostics.   We asked Dave Ferguson, from the Science and Technology Office at United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to talk to us a bit about this Challenge and the opportunity available for the winning Solvers.

Hi Dave.  Thanks for talking to our Solvers today.

Absolutely – thanks for asking.

Your partnership – USAID, Nike, NASA and the State Department is interesting – can you tell us how this collaboration came about?

If you think about it, there’s a pretty significant benefit to NASA, USAID and the State Department working together to share skills, information and expertise.  NASA, for example, has spent years, decades really, perfecting the art of working in resource constrained environments, through the evolution of manned space flight.  This expertise can be used in all kinds of other situations, to solve to problems in developing countries, or in dealing with natural disasters, just to name a few.    Another example is the extremely sophisticated earth sensing and data analysis capabilities that NASA has developed, which can be used to deal with environmental impacts from natural disasters.   USAID and the State Department have similar expertise to share – and we realized that we are more likely to succeed when we work together.

To round out the partnership, it made sense to bring in an organization from the private sector.  For this Challenge in particular, with its focus on improving health and promoting healthy habits, Nike was a natural fit, because of their focus on viable business models and sustainability.  Nike has always been an environmentally responsible corporation, with a long history of releasing innovative products, therefore they were excited for the opportunity to be part of the collaboration.

What are your objectives in participating in this Challenge? (more…)

Congratulations to InnoCentive Seeker Precyse Technologies.  Their Challenge was recently featured in an article on About.com, reproduced below.

Tech Firm Turns to Crowdsourcing for Technology Solution
By Mitchell York, About.com Guide

When most people think of crowdsourcing, the type of projects that come to mind are often creative but relatively simple things like logo development and web design. What happens when a company has a complex technology problem to solve and turns to the crowd?

Precyse Technologies is a provider of real-time location and supply-chain solutions that help companies track their assets using RFID technology. Its challenge was to improve mobile device performance and battery life. Precyse was looking for a way to “wake up” active RFID tags as they arrive from transit or enter a customer facility-without draining the battery’s energy listening to these wake-up calls. The company did not have the technology resources in house to solve the problem and turned to crowdsourcing site InnoCentive.

Rom Eizenberg, co-founder and CMO of Precyse, gave About.com some insights into the crowdsourcing project.

Did Precyse try to solve the issue another more traditional way first, and then arrive at the crowdsourced solution?

We chose to use crowdsourcing instead of attempting to solve the challenge in-house, as this alternative provided us with shorter time-to-market, excellent access to the best talent around the world and with a stronger ROI and lower development risk.

How did Precyse find out about InnoCentive?

We were introduced to InnoCentive through a mutual investor, Spencer Trask Ventures. We had explored the use of crowedsourcing before on simpler challenges such as graphic design and even participated and nominated a finalist company on a challenge sponsored by the DOT and IBM seeking to identify technologies to reduce traffic congestion with a company called Vencorp. In this sense, we were first solvers and then customers.

How many responses did Precyse get from Innocentive and how did it make a selection?

More than 350 solvers opened project rooms on the InnoCentive web platform. Precyse received more than 300 ideas and we narrowed that down to 3 finalists from whom we chose one winner. We could evaluate each solver’s solution based on the detailed proof and calculations provided by many of the participants. We worked with great engineers from around the world, each offering his or her unique approach to solve the technical challenge we introduced, and our CTO, Michael Braiman, who co-founded Precyse, evaluated the technologies proposed by the solvers to choose the best.

Were there issues of trust in having a solution offered from someone the company had never met and didn’t know? Was there a vetting process?

We had no issues with trust as InnoCentive provides anonymity for the company through the filing process. The vetting process allowed the company to evaluate each individual submission to its full extent, choosing only those which were detailed and supported claims with hard evidence and in our case, mathematical calculations backing assertions.

Did Precyse pick one solver or solution, or several, and how did that affect how much it paid?

We chose only one solution because it was superior to all others, but if we had selected several solutions we would have been required to pay for each solution.

You estimate a cost savings of $250,000. Can you tell me more about where the savings comes from, and what you would have done ordinarily for something like this?

We estimate the savings by calculating the costs associated with assigning a team of engineers to evaluate the problem, performing background research and consequently developing the solution. This process entails management and other overheads, and does not guarantee success as we were after an innovative technology which was not available in the market at start-point. Being able to buy an “option” on IP and pay only if the challenge was solved allowed us not only to save on costs but also to mitigate R&D risk. Of course, the access we got, tapping into the best minds around the world was an intriguing advantage for us. Some of the participants held expertise in the specific areas relating to the solution we sought that we did not necessarily have in-house.

What was the time frame of this project?

It took approximately four months from initial concept with InnoCentive to selecting the best solution.

We recently announced a Challenge seeking cell lines for Chordoma, a very rare type of bone cancer.  We asked Josh Sommer, Founder and Executive Director of the Chordoma Foundation, to talk to us a bit about his Challenge and tell us why it’s so important that a solution is found.

Hi Josh,  thanks for being with us today and talking to our Solvers about your Challenge.

Absolutely – thanks for having me.

Your Challenge is seeking cell lines for Chordoma.  Can you tell us a bit about this disease?

Chordoma is a slow-growing, but relentless, form of bone cancer that occurs in the skull and spine in people of all ages. Because of their proximity to the brain and spinal cord, chordomas often cause serious neurologic impairment, and are quite complicated to treat. About thirty percent of chordoma patients are cured with surgery and radiation, but for those who aren’t, few treatment options are available, as chemotherapy is usually ineffective. As a result, the majority of patients will succumb to their disease within 7 years. Recently, a number of promising therapeutic targets have been identified which could offer hope to chordoma patients in desperate need of effective treatment options. Cell lines are crucial to evaluating these therapeutic targets and for testing and developing new treatments. Unfortunately, scarcity of valid chordoma cell lines has hamstrung the efforts of dozens of would-be chordoma researchers, and is severely hampering treatment development efforts.

Why have Chordoma cell lines been so difficult to find in the past? (more…)

We recently announced the posting of the first InnoCentive for Startups Challenge, called “The Internet of Things“, by Precyse Technologies. We asked John Stopper, Co-Founder, CEO and President, to talk to us a bit about the Challenge and about being InnoCentive’s first InnoCentive for Startups Seeker.

Precyse Technologies is leveraging InnoCentive’s open innovation solution for startup companies. How will this benefit small companies? Would you recommend this?

Shifting from core product development to the high-growth stage in a startup’s evolution requires the company to scale rapidly while maintaining a lean and flexible structure. InnoCentive’s new offering targeted at startups allowed us to gain immediate access to a global talent base at a dramatically lower price point compared to the classical model of recruitment, training and execution. The InnoCentive approach also gave us greater control to sort through the different solver solutions, picking the best of breed approach with a very short time to market. The price advantage, time to market, control over the solution and the immediate access we gained to a global talent base makes InnoCentive a great choice for Precyse, both in the R&D and in the business development domains. I would recommend InnoCentive for startups to any company focusing on rapidly growing its market and product offering while maintaining an innovation advantage.

Your current Business Challenge is called “Enabling the Internet of Things“. Can you please explain the meaning behind the name, and explain a little bit about the Challenge.

Precyse offers its customers a wireless network solution, dedicated for asset and machine communications. This asset network allows inanimate objects, such as engines on an automotive manufacturer’s line, to wirelessly communicate their location, sensory status and even get remote instructions to take action. N3, the first bi-directional, wireless asset network standard from Precyse takes a lip forward in RFID evolution. Coupled with the Precyse Smart Agent, a ‘cell phone” build for assets, Precyse offers an out-of-the-box solution with the promise to build a world of networked and interconnected made-smart devices. Everything from engine parts, home appliances or cars may be in communications range, heralding the dawn of a new era; one in which today’s Internet (of data and people) gives way to tomorrow’s Internet of Things.

Following a successful technology cooperation with SAP, we decided to launch a first business challenge in the SAP pavilion on InnoCentive. The objective of this challenge is to identify exciting new opportunities, integrating the Precyse real time asset visibility product suite with legacy software solutions from leading supply-chain management vendors. We wish to incentive the community to help us indentify new partners and new end-customer opportunities, embracing this innovative approach for real-time supply chain visibility.

What appealed to you about posting your Challenge on InnoCentive?

We are always searching for new and innovative ways to enable fast growth and a smarter use of the company’s capital resources. Precyse found both with the Innocentive offering for startups. The impressive short term impact we experienced and the excellent support we have been receiving from the InnoCentive team contributed to making this a successful experience – one I would recommend to any fast-growth business to explore.

Paradigm recently posted a $100,000 Challenge seeking ways of storing and analyzing data in 3D fault networks.  This Challenge is unique in its award amount and in the amount of data that Paradigm has shared with Solvers.  We asked Duane Dopkin, senior vice president of technology at Paradigm, to talk to us a bit about the Challenge and what they are hoping to achieve with the solution.

Hi Duane – thanks for agreeing to talk to us today.  As background for our Solvers, can you tell us a bit about the current state of oil and gas exploration?

Hi – sure.  In order to sustain growth and fulfill hydrocarbon demand, oil and gas companies must aggressively replace depleted hydrocarbon reserves and offset production decline in mature fields. Replacement of hydrocarbon reserves has meant shifts in exploration to frontier areas (e.g. deep waters like the Gulf of Mexico, Arctic, etc.) or investigation of unconventional sources of hydrocarbons (e.g. heavy oil, tight gas, shale oil, coal bed methane).  Both of these shifts have required oil companies to become much more technically savvy.

Your Challenge is seeking a method of analyzing data related to faults in the earth’s crust. Can you tell us how this information will be used?

Subsurface faults and fractures can serve as flow conduits for hydrocarbons or conversely as permeability traps that compartmentalize reservoir hydrocarbons. Although many fractures and small scale faults cannot be detected in subsurface seismic images, larger faults and regional faults help geoscientists understand the deformation history of geologic basins which, in turn, can reveal information about hydrocarbon accumulation and hydrocarbon migration pathways. Faults and fractures can also compartmentalize areas of high pressure which can create drilling problems and safety hazards. Consequently, a full understanding of a fault network at basin and reservoir scales is a prerequisite for exploration in new areas as well as a prerequisite for well planning and drilling in development fields and mature fields. Obtaining a holistic understanding of fault networks depends not only on a geoscientists ability to locate, interpret, and model faults from subsurface signals and images (well logs, image logs, seismic data), but also to perform complex spatial and topological queries on the fault network data to better understand the history of subsurface deformation and its current deformed state.

What impact do you think the solution to this Challenge will have on the environment/more efficient use of natural resources?

Fractured reservoirs contain a large proportion of the world’s hydrocarbon reserves. Through a better understanding of a geologic basin and reservoirs fault network, geoscientists can not only drill less, but they can also drill safer. Indeed today, horizontal drilling techniques are employed in fractured reservoirs to optimize their drainage. By “geosteering” perpendicular to groups of natural fractures, engineers are able to drill fewer but more economic wells.

Paradigm posted a similar Challenge on the InnoCentive marketplace in 2008 – how does this Challenge differ from the earlier Challenge?

In 2008 we did post a Challenge similar to this one.  The Challenge involved defining an optimum fault network data structure. Based on the responses to the initial Challenge and the importance of the problem to both Paradigm and its oil and gas customers, we decided to refine the Challenge and raise the stakes.  We enriched and injected the initial Challenge with digital data examples, more real data images, and clarification on the current state of the art and suggestions for where Solvers should look for improvement. This Challenge upgrade was backed up with a substantially higher award (maximum of $100,000) to entice Solvers from many fields and to encourage them to participate in this scientific Challenge.

This is your third InnoCentive Challenge. What have you learned thus far about sourcing your Challenges on the InnoCentive Marketplace?

Paradigm has posted three Challenges to the InnoCentive Marketplace. With each posting we have experienced a gratifying spectrum of responses reflecting the diverse perspectives coming from outside the comfort zone of our own industry and scientific disciplines. Working with InnoCentive to impose more discipline and clarity in the formulation of our Challenges, has helped us help our Solvers to focus their responses.

Why do you think open innovation is a good fit for problems in the oil and gas industry?

The oil and gas industry searches for subsurface hydrocarbons using many scientific disciplines, mathematical methods, computer science advances, and engineering practices. Many of the seeds of advancement in this industry have originated outside of the oil and gas industry. In spite of the tremendous pool of talent inside the industry, we believe it is a healthy exercise to seek solutions to new problems from outside, as time-to-solution pressures are becoming more acute in this unpredictable oil and gas economy.

Thanks Duane – good luck with your Challenge.

Thank you.