Perspectives on Innovation

We recently announced a Challenge with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) to improve sanitary conditions for more than a billion people in the world using pit latrines.  We asked the Director of Sanitation Ventures, run by LSHTM, to provide a bit of background on the problem at the heart of this Challenge.

Hi Walter.  Can you tell us a bit about Sanitation Ventures and how you’re connected to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine?

Good sanitation is one of the greatest advances in public health, yet it remains unavailable to billions of poor people in developing countries. Around 1.7 billion people worldwide still use one of the most basic forms of on-site (non-piped) sanitation, the pit latrine. And they face a recurring problem: the contents don’t decompose fast enough or fully, and the pits fill up. This seriously undermines people’s health and quality of life.

Sanitation Ventures is a three-year project to tackle these problems, run by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. I was involved in developing the proposal with LSHTM and the UK development agency Oxfam. We’re a diverse team of business professionals, scientists, academic researchers and innovation specialists, who want a world where safe, sustainable sanitation is accessible to everyone.

Our approach is based on two core beliefs:

• Many recent scientific advances, particularly in biotechnology, can be readily applied to improving sanitation in sustainable, affordable ways
• Market-led approaches are the best way to provide novel, sustainable interventions to address key development challenges.

Building on the latest advances in science and technology, we’re generating new knowledge about pit latrines and developing innovations in on-site sanitation that will offer longer-lasting, affordable sanitation for low-income users. The BSF larvae approach is just one of several we’re exploring. We’ll then help make sure these solutions are successfully brought to market, where they can have sustainable impact on users’ lives.

Your Challenge is essentially seeking a way to keep pit latrines from overfilling, using black soldier fly (BSF) larvae.  How did this idea of using BSF come about and has it been proven to work elsewhere? Read the rest of this entry »

In March of this year, we started sending a “Certificate of Performance” for winning Solvers to put on display in recognition of their accomplishment. This month, due to feedback from Solvers in the Winning Solvers LinkedIn group, we decided to send out certificates for every single Challenge awarded to any Solver who had logged in to InnoCentive within the past two years. This translated to over 800 certificates to be printed, stuffed in to addressed envelopes, and then mailed all around the world. I documented the whole process so that you guys can get a peek inside InnoCentive!

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!

Please join us on Tuesday, December 13th at 2:00pm EST for “Harness the Global Talent Pool to Accelerate Innovation” a free webinar featuring Braden Kelley, industry thought leader and co-founder of innovationexcellence.com

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

How some of the most well-known companies manage their open innovation efforts

Why having a talent network strategy is becoming increasingly important; and

How to utilize open innovation and crowdsourcing resources to drive your business.

by Alph Bingham, Founder and Board Member, InnoCentive

Recently Dwayne Spradlin and I published a blog titled “Why Challenges will transform the future of innovation, work and business” in which we laid the groundwork for the topic “What is A Challenge?”  In this blog, we described the Challenge as:

We committed to exploring each of these facets in more depth.  In today’s post, we’re going to begin the discussion of the Challenge as the fundamental unit of problem solving.

The Challenge as fundamental unit of problem solving – Part 1

As we worked to create a successful business around this new model, new language sprang up to characterize it.  We have mentioned the coining of the terms “crowdsourcing” by Jeff Howe and “broadcast search” by Karim Lakhani.   Internally InnoCentive used familiar terms in very deliberate ways.  Our customers, providing challenging problems to our network, became “Seekers.”  And our network was one of “Solvers.”  The problems themselves evolved to “Challenges.”  And we used these descriptions as we analyzed questions like:  What was the value proposition to Seekers?  Why did Solvers engage? And how did the properties of the Challenge serve to effectively contribute to its solution?

As we deepened our knowledge of the Challenge and its role and the means of maximizing its service, we recognized that the Challenge shares DNA with the modularity processes, earlier described by Carliss Baldwin and Kim Clark of Harvard Business School. A portion of the global innovation objective is formulated as a Challenge, in which a “Challenge” essentially represents the problem statement for a block of work that can be modularized and in most cases rendered “portable.” That is, such a block of work can be outsourced or insourced as an integral unit. Read the rest of this entry »

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? Read the rest of this entry »