If you’ve visited InnoCentive.com in the past week, you probably noticed that nearly every Challenge now has a referral award in addition to a Challenge award. This referral award is paid out to InnoCentive users who play a key role in the Challenge-solving process by exposing the Challenge to the person who is ultimately motivated and able to solve it.

At InnoCentive, we believe that diversity of experience can overcome the toughest Challenges. Time and time again, winning Solvers hail from backgrounds outside of the domain of the Challenges they solve. But for Seekers, lack of diversity is a serious limiting factor of innovation; after all, every organization is limited by the number of employees and contractors that it’s able to employ.

We address the diversity constraint by identifying problems that matter within Seeker organizations, formulating them as discrete Challenges, and then broadcasting those Challenges to the world. Yet, in a world of billions of internet-connected individuals, posting a Challenge on InnoCentive.com is not always sufficient for reaching the individual with the right set of experiences to develop a winning solution. Given that it’s unrealistic to expect every potential Solver to read every Challenge, we’ve recognized and responded to the need for a new role in the InnoCentive community: the Connector.

A Connector acts as an innovation catalyst, reading Challenges and then intelligently broadcasting them to potentially interested and capable audiences. By acting as a Connector, you play a vital role in the innovation process whenever you refer a Challenge to the person who ultimately solves it. Here’s how it works: Visit the Challenge Center or a Challenge summary or details page of almost any Challenge to generate and share a unique referral link to that Challenge; if you refer the winner to the Challenge with your referral link, you’ll receive a referral award in recognition of your crucial role in motivating the winning Solver to read that Challenge and submit a solution. In addition, if you introduce new Solvers to InnoCentive by referring them to Challenges before they’ve registered accounts on InnoCentive.com, you’ll earn an award for each one who wins any Challenge within a year.

One major benefit of the Challenge Referral Program is the enhanced relevance of every Challenge. Even if you’re sure you can’t solve a given Challenge on your own, it’s still worth reading the overview or details and thinking “who might be able to Solve this Challenge.” If you refer the Challenge to the right person, you’ll receive a referral award of up to $10,000 USD. Who knows, maybe just reading and considering the Challenge will prompt an unexpected ‘eureka.’ Either way, there’s never been a better time to get serious about following Challenges. To help you keep an eye on and share the latest Challenges as easily as possible, we’ve just released InnoCentive Anywhere, a free mobile app for iPhone and Android devices.

InnoCentive community members aren’t the only ones excited about this new program: “Life Technologies is very excited to be participating in InnoCentive’s referral program,” says Nigel Beard, Head of Scientific Operations of Life Technologies. “This program is designed to extend the reach of Challenges by tapping into the intellectual networks of the existing Solver community. Not only does this provide the potential to increase the number of active Solvers, but more importantly, it allows us to get these complex research Challenges in front of the best minds with the highest probability of solving them.” By referring Challenges such as “Life Grand Challenge: Twice the Accuracy of Genome Sequencing,” you could play a vital role in advancing the next generation of DNA sequencing technologies!

To get started, visit the Challenge overview page of any Challenge with a referral award (nearly all Challenges have one!). On the page, you’ll see a referral module which makes it easy to broadcast the Challenge to potential Solvers. For more information, visit Start Referring.

Please leave your comments and reactions below!

A successful solution contains more than great ideas — the presentation of those ideas is equally vital. Solvers frequently ask us “how should I format my solution?” This is a difficult question, as every Challenge is different and there is no one-size-fits-all solution template (we’ve awarded submissions that range from two paragraphs to over 100 pages). Instead of providing an overly restrictive template or form for submissions, we suggest keeping in mind a few simple guidelines. Below are three past blog posts from our client services teams that highlight some common themes and best practices for developing and presenting a winning solution.

Blog post: 10 Tips for Writing a Winning Solution

Not sure where to begin? Start with these 10 tips based on previous winning solutions. Remember if you have a Challenge-specific question, you can communicate with the Seeker using the “Messages” tab in the Challenge Project Room.

Blog post: Habits of Winning Solvers

“The most successful Solvers usually ask a few direct questions early on [via the "Messages" tab in the Challenge Project Room] to make sure they understand the problem correctly. They may also mention an idea of two briefly to see if I think they are reasonable in my and the Seeker’s opinions. They are not looking for yes or no if it will be a winning solution, but just making sure there is not some “red flag” item that they are missing where they might be wasting their time from the start.”

Blog post: The Importance of Solution Requirements

“I find it very helpful when Solvers conclude their proposals with a special section where they repeat every individual requirement – one by one — followed by a short summary of how the solution addresses this point.”

We’ve also recently updated out Solver Resources page to include several free online tools for information gathering, analysis, and collaboration.

Let me know in the comments if these guidelines are helpful, and what further direction we can provide for you. Are there any other online tools that you frequently use for developing solutions? To the winning Solvers out there: what other guidelines or suggestions would you give to a less experienced Solver?

Best of luck!

Tim

by Christian Stevenson, Ph.D.
Innovation Program Manager, InnoCentive

As an organic chemist and Innovation Program Manager at InnoCentive, one of my favorite things to do is to work with our dynamic Solver community to help them solve our Seekers’ pressing problems. I recently had an opportunity to do that in a very direct way when we carried out two surveys of our Solvers. InnoCentive was seeking ways to make Solvers happier with our Novel Molecule Challenges (NMCs, Challenges in which Seekers desire delivery of small amounts of novel molecules for testing in their assays). We did this even though InnoCentive was already giving Solvers an opportunity to find potential uses for the compounds they already had (something we know you’re interested in, but that’s often difficult to do) and get rewarded for it in the process – for a total of over $350,000 in awards to date for NMCs alone.

In response to the survey results, here are the concerns that you, our Solvers, voiced, and what we at InnoCentive are now doing as a result:

1. Clarify the Intellectual Property (IP) implications of participating in NMCs.

We realized there was confusion about the exact details of how IP worked with our NMCs. We know it’s a little obtuse.  So we re-worded that portion of the Challenge, and highlighted it in the Challenge document. In exchange for the Initial Award, Solvers only give our Seekers a non-exclusive license to test the compounds in the Seekers assays and use them to make new compounds for testing. If a Seeker desires exclusive IP rights in order to manufacture or sell your particular “new composition of matter,” they have to negotiate an additional award with you for that compound (see more below in #2).

2. Increase award amounts.

You told us the award amounts were too low to justify giving your compounds to our Seekers. Even for compounds you already had, the time involved in simply packaging and shipping the compounds made some of the awards too low. At InnoCentive’s urging, our Seekers have increased the Initial Award amounts. Furthermore, Solvers told us that our old system of awarding a flat rate of $25,000 for exclusive IP rights for a compound was not what all Solvers wanted. We’ve changed that portion of the Challenge so Solvers are now free to negotiate directly with our Seekers and secure whatever price they believe is fair for their compound.

3. Further protect Solver IP.

Some of our Solvers expressed concern about giving Seekers the exact molecular structure of their compounds (since molecular structures lie at the heart of IP on chemical compounds). As a former medicinal chemist at Merck and Co., Inc. I was particularly attuned to this concern. To answer it, InnoCentive has developed “Fingerprinting” NMCs. In this special sub-type of Challenges, the Seeker does not receive the molecular structure of Solver’s compounds in exchange for the Initial Award. In those cases, our Seekers have agreed to choose molecules based solely on physico-chemical data (molecular weight, calculated LogP, polar surface area, etc.) and results of a “Fingerprinting” program InnoCentive developed to ensure that Seekers acquire a representative set of Solvers’ molecules.

4. Make it even easier to participate in NMCs.

With new NMCs posting all the time, Solvers told us they wanted us to help them identify when they had molecules that might qualify for a Challenge. We’re all busy, so we figured anything we can do to help you stay focused on chemistry would be great. With our new Upload Your Libraries!  Challenge, we do just that. If you upload a database or Excel file of your compound collection, we’ll store it in our secure database. Every time a new NMC posts, we’ll query our database and email you if you have any molecules that qualify. Of course, the decision to actually submit the compounds to the Challenge is still entirely yours – we won’t forward your molecules to the Seeker unless you decide to submit to the specific NMC.

We thought long and hard about the suggestions you made, and we hope you’re happy with the changes we’ve made to address them. Please let us know if there is anything else we can do to help make NMCs even more attractive to you.

Thanks, and best of luck in the lab! -Christian

Do you know someone who would be a great InnoCentive Solver? Someone who is a visual thinker and a do-it-yourself tinkerer who is always asking “what if” and “why not” in their never-ending quest to make things “better.” Someone with eyes on the stars who can help NASA forecast solar flares with an 80% accuracy rate? Or a mechanical whiz who could create the next mosquito trap or enhance the next generation of BOGO lights for African villages? Or perhaps someone with creative ideas who loves to brainstorm about interesting concepts? If you do, refer them to be an InnoCentive Solver and have the opportunity to earn a cash bonus!

Referring someone is easy:  click here to learn more and get your referral link. Forward your link to anyone you think would like to be a Solver. When friends or colleagues click on your link and register with InnoCentive, you’ll automatically get credit for referring them. When they solve their first Challenge, you can earn up to $1,500!

Sincerely,

The InnoCentive Team

I mentioned earlier in the summer that we would be asking for your input as we develop our strategic plan for 2011-13. The time has come: We’ve begun the fall strategic planning process at InnoCentive and we need you to weigh in about what is most important to the Solver community as we develop plans, initiatives, and priorities for the coming years of growth and success.

Our goal is to create and foster the most vibrant, engaged Solver community in the world by developing a robust work environment (products, policies, services) Solvers will use continually in the flow of their careers.

We’ve heard from some of you already and we’ve got some ideas about where to focus. Right now, you can help us by telling us what you think by taking a short survey (see below). Once we’ve gathered your input, there will be more opportunities to contribute to this process of developing the future of work for Solvers. Please participate!

Take the survey now by clicking here!

As always, many thanks!

JD