A stack of Challenge certificates, all for top Solver Yury Bodrov

The massive pile of certificates. We're going to need some help...

First, we lured everyone in to the conference room.

Then we put them to work

Fueled by pizza, we made short work of addressing and stuffing the envelopes. Here's Mike Bittarelli sorting the enveloped by country.

If you’ve won a Challenge, you should receive a certificate in the mail any day.

Keep on Solving!

This post was written by Innovation Program Manager Dan Kuster, who designed and developed a large portion of the next generation Prodigy online scoring system.

When we ask Solvers and Seekers how to improve the open innovation experience, we consistently hear about a need for quick and useful feedback. After all, Solvers are committing time and resources for a chance to win an award…as a Solver, it can be hard to know if it is worth the effort. On the other hand, Seekers feel the burden of uncertainty too, by exposing valuable problems to the world in the hope that someone will have a solution. If it were possible to pre-evaluate a submission, then Solvers would be able to estimate the risk in developing a full solution, and Seekers could manage an open innovation project with greater certainty of the results.

The Prodigy online scoring system was developed as an attempt to provide some quick and objective feedback, by providing Solvers with a single number score indicating the quality of their submission, relative to the Challenge Requirements, and to other Solvers. The first incarnation of the Prodigy system compared a Solver’s predictions to a known answer, and reported how well the Solver was able to predict the known answer. The next generation of Prodigy takes the idea of online feedback even further, by allowing Solvers to upload native R code. A Solver’s code is dynamically evaluated, in real-time, on our standardized server hardware, where performance can be measured objectively on an independent set of data.  For Solvers, this means you can spend your effort developing good code, and when your score is good, you know it is worthwhile to invest the time in making a full submission. For Seekers, this means submissions are guaranteed to work, because performance has already been demonstrated on an independent system with independent data.

If you are interested in trying out the Prodigy scoring system for yourself, check out this Challenge: https://www.innocentive.com/ar/challenge/9932794. An upcoming blog post will show “How To” write R code for this Challenge, make a submission to the Prodigy online scoring system, and see how you stack up against other Solvers.

While the Prodigy scoring systems begin to address the need for quick and useful feedback early in the open innovation experience, we realize there are even more opportunities to enable Solvers to focus on the most interesting and valuable solutions, especially beyond the domain of computational or analytical Challenges. Do you have an idea that would make the open innovation experience better?  Leave a comment to let us know!

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

Today’s guest post is provided by winning InnoCentive Solver  Harvey Arbesman, and his wife Marian Arbesman.  Harvey won the Discovery Prize and the Thought Prize in the Prize4Life ALS Challenge. Harvey and Marian are innovation consultants who in 2002 founded ArbesIdeas, Inc., a research and consulting company devoted to innovation in the life sciences.  They’ll be contributing to this blog from time to time as part of our “Help a Solver Succeed” series.

“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody else has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought.” Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

What’s your vision for solving a Challenge?  Before you start working on a new project, how do you imagine yourself tackling the Challenge? Some people may imagine themselves struggling and toiling away in the middle of the night, while others see themselves walking along a windswept beach waiting for the moment when a great solution seems to come out of nowhere.  I’d like to share with you our approach for taking on and defining new Challenges, one that combines a variety of proven techniques for increasing innovation. While we may not be able to help you get around working in the middle of the night, and we definitely can’t provide the beach, we can help you with a streamlined and systematic approach that can take away some of the angst of finding new solutions and hopefully even make it fun.

The InnoCentive Solver community is enormous and diverse. Not only are Solvers found all over the world, but also they come from many different disciplines and have varying levels of expertise solving complex problems. This blog targets many different kinds of Solvers:  people interested in solving a problem who need some help to get started; those who have previously submitted solutions (and maybe even won), but would like some help making it happen more quickly; and those who are novices in a given area and need some ideas for how to get started.

Research consistently shows that innovation and creativity can be improved by learning specific strategies and methods. A systematic approach to problem solving is useful as it helps one first develop a firm grasp of the problem being solved, then moves on to the generation of lots of potential solutions for a problem, which is then followed by a third stage that helps the Solver pick the best potential solution and develop that solution. By leveling the problem solving playing field, a Solver is able to grasp concepts outside of his or her field, and bring well-developed expertise to the table.

A new Challenge arrives in your inbox, and before the adrenaline rush begins, you may start to question your expertise. Here are two simple steps to help you get a good handle on the Challenge and overcome those feelings of “no, this one just isn’t for me”.

Step 1. Read the Challenge and all of its details

Step 2. Read the Challenge again and immerse yourself in the problem that you are trying to solve. Really look at it and understand what the question/Challenge means. The Message Center in your project room is a great resource to ask the very qualified staff at InnoCentive for any clarifications that you need regarding the Challenge. How one person understands a question may differ from how it is viewed by another, and possibly may differ from how the Seeker views it (and in this case, the Seeker is the key interpreter of the question).  In addition, as you play with the Challenge in this early stage, get some feedback from friends, colleagues and family members, and start to think about a variety of ways how you might approach the problem, and what types of information and resources you would need to understand the Challenge.

Immersing yourself in the Challenge is the best way to be ready to develop new solutions to a problem. In future posts we will be discussing other ways (e.g., mapping the problem) to extend the immersion process. Immersing yourself in the Challenge helps you not get stuck in a given thought pattern and frees you to look at the Challenge from a totally different perspective than from your initial reaction to the Challenge.  Have fun with it, and keep in mind that this may be an opportunity to help change the world!

Harvey Arbesman, MD, MS
Marian Arbesman, PhD, OTR/L

I am writing to tell you about a upcoming event that may be of interest to you. On March 30th at 11AM (EST), I will be hosting a 1 hour webinar for Seekers interested in learning more about what InnoCentive does for Computational and Bioinformatics Challenges. I am planning on discussing InnoCentive’s work with global Seekers and how we have been able to deliver an 80% success rate for Challenges in those disciplines. Plus, as you may have seen in my most recent blog post, we just launched the Prodigy tool and I will speak about how it is revolutionizing data-oriented or computational Challenges. Lastly I will conclude the webinar with a brief question and answer period. This is a fantastic way to learn about best practices of running computational and bioinformatics Challenges and how to maximize your success with future Challenges!

Everyone is welcome to attend no matter if you’re a new Seeker, an experienced Seeker looking to expand your deployment of Open Innovation or even, perhaps, just a curious Solver. The identities and affiliations of all attendees will be kept confidential.

You can register online here.

Leave a comment here if you have any questions about the webinar.

Thanks,
Gabriel