Perspectives on Innovation

Anjai Lal and Sahsa Vyash are the the winners of the third Economist-InnoCentive Challenge, The Economist-InnoCentive Entrepreneurship Challenge. They presented their winning plan at The Economist’s Ideas Economy: Innovation Event on March 23-24 in Berkeley, CA. This blog post is by Anjai.

I am currently a second year MBA student at the Yale School of Management. I graduated from Indian Institute of Technology in 2006 with a major in Electrical Engineering. Thereafter, I worked with British Telecom as a consultant where I was primarily involved in strategy and planning. At BT, I held a cross functional profile that spanned around Crisis Management, Strategy, Technology, Finance and Project and Vendor Management. I am passionate about the telecom/technology sector and am extremely interested in the emerging markets. I will graduate from Yale School of Management in May, 2011.

At Yale, my interests lie in Strategy, Finance and Technology. I spent the last summer with Zephyr Management, a Private Equity fund in NYC. I also interned with IBM in Business Performance Services. I head the South Asian Business Forum at the School of Management and am also a member of the organizing team of Asia Tomorrow- Yale’s premier student run conference. (more…)

As 2010 draws to a close we would like to thank you all for your support of InnoCentive. We achieved great things with your help, and anticipate the same momentum in the upcoming year. But, before looking forward to 2011, let’s take a few moments to consider the past year, and recap major InnoCentive milestones in 2010. After all, a good retrospective can put you in the right frame of mind to tackle the future.

The past year has been exciting and groundbreaking in many ways: we launched the Emergency Response 2.0 pavilion in response to the BP Oil Spill and other natural disasters; we helped propel collaboration and Challenge-Driven Innovation in the U.S. Government by working with NASA, In-Q-Tel and other government agencies; Solvers from around the world (people just like you) had an unprecedented opportunity to contribute to the NASA program and impact how the U.S. explores the “final frontier;” and we helped Toyota elicit ideas to improve the world using some of their most innovative technologies through their  Ideas for Good initiative. Then there were the Public Good Challenges, Partnerships with Nature and The Economist, and major improvements to our products and website. (more…)

Chris Wilmer has been awarded for two Challenges – Synthetic DNA Management Software and Water Problems Affecting People in Developing Countries.

Science is a noble pursuit, and I would pay to be a scientist if I had to. You can imagine how lucky I feel then, that the payment works the other way around.

Designing porous materials for carbon dioxide capture and hydrogen storage is my Ph.D. research at Northwestern University in the department of Chemical & Biological Engineering. My advisor, Professor Randall Q. Snurr, has helped me tremendously to become a specialist in molecular simulations and a super-computer systems administrator. These skills, simulations, programming and systems architecture, have been invaluable when approaching InnoCentive Challenges. As the speed of computers increases, there are fewer and fewer materials science and chemistry problems that cannot be better understood by a properly designed computer simulation.

While my current research is in Chicago, I was born in Canada, and I have a bachelor’s degree in engineering science from the University of Toronto. Biology and bioengineering are my hobby sciences, which I pursue (or just read about) in my spare time. Greater exposure to these fields is one of the benefits that draws me to InnoCentive.

I have been participating regularly in humanitarian and bio-related InnoCentive challenges since August, 2009. It is enlightening to read about contemporary problems in the variety of industries to which InnoCentive caters (which as far as I can tell, is every conceivable industry short of the military), and it is also fun to attempt to solve them! I have found that, while it is difficult to come up with a great idea, it is usually easy to make a half-decent suggestion… and sometimes that’s enough!

I would like to see InnoCentive provide additional services to help Solvers and ultimately lead to better solutions for the Seekers (e.g., providing mock solutions to the Solver community that preserved the average number of typographical errors of actual winning solutions). I’m glad that InnoCentive is so successful already, and I’m sure that as it evolves it will become much more successful in the future!

If you are a would-be Solver but are unsure of how to go about it, please feel free to send me an e-mail. I have a wide variety of interests, and am always excited to collaborate on a project!

Best regards and good luck

-Chris

Abshar Rashid is the winning Solver for the Challenge Software Trading Models.

Greetings – I am Abshar Rashid, a professional computer software engineer, with a Bachelors degree from NED University, Pakistan.

Though I have only 2 years of practical experience in the field (I recently graduated in 2008), I have been fortunate enough to work on some very innovative and creative projects during my past jobs. Apart from software development, I have a keen interest in Management Sciences and thus am currently pursuing an MBA degree along with a daytime job.

I became very interested in software development at a very young age: I designed my first software program (A Quiz Application) when I was around 9. It began when my mother bought me a mid-school level toy computer that had a built in Q-Basic compiler. This toy was probably too old for me, but it attracted my curiosity. I remember I had learnt the Q-Basic language all by myself using the Toy Computer’s manual. In fact, I was more interested in this “programming stuff” than all the other games/fun-activities this toy had to offer. I still have this toy with me today; alas it no longer works despite several attempts to fix it.

I joined InnoCentive only a few weeks before the submission date of my awarded Challenge. At first, I checked many Challenges that I found interesting and thought I could work on; but in the end I was only able to work on one because of some personal-life time constraints. My reason for working on this Challenge was its relevance to both of my favorite fields – Software Engineering and Management Sciences. I also anticipated getting a good learning and research experience, whether my solution was awarded or not. I believe, one way or another, knowledge always pays off. One might not succeed in a certain research challenge or a project at work, but the experience always transforms you into someone more skilled and knowledgeable. Initially, I was awed by the many scholarly profiles (PhDs or Masters) in the past winner’s list; I asked myself whether I should even attempt a solution, having such a comparatively humble experience and education. But then I just re-iterated to myself that this was a learning experience and winning was not everything. I guess it was this sincere commitment that made me come up with a solution that I was finally quite confident about, as I submitted it.

The research model that InnoCentive is using is highly commendable. It is advantageous to both the Seekers and Solvers – such that Seekers gain the advantage of ‘outsourcing’ their R&D issues to a collective talent from all around the world, while Solvers like me get a chance to work on highly practical and intricate R&D industrial issues. Also, I’d specially like to thank all the InnoCentive staff for being extremely supportive throughout. Not only was the evaluation process perfectly authentic; the awarding process was very straightforward and simple.

To me, innovation means to seek within. I never begin my research by searching or browsing through the internet for ideas and solutions. I do not remember having searched online for a single instance while working on this awarded Challenge. I always primarily try to come up with my own designs and my own methods, sometimes brainstorming for several straight hours. I would only search the net if my own brainstorming failed to yield the required results. InnoCentive provides the world with opportunities to polish and practice our creativity and knowledge. I’d recommend everyone to actively pursue the Challenges beyond their interests using InnoCentive as a Platform.

The days and weeks pass, and, until last week, oil continued to blast upwards from the bottom of the Gulf. As time marches on, the pace of new solutions has slowed as well, yet we still continue to receive submissions from you about how to stop the gushing oil and protect the coastline.

With the end of the Gulf Oil Spill Challenge in sight, we wanted to showcase an innovative solution that was submitted by a student from an Advanced Placement (AP) Environmental Sciences class from high school in New Jersey.

What I love about this piece is that it came from the leaders of tomorrow (students), it’s simple, and it focuses on the future (the clean up) even while many people and politicians remain focused on the past (blame) or the present (capping the wellhead). Here is the submission:

“Recently in our AP Environmental class, my teacher came in and told us about the oil spill.

He then told us about your website and began having us work on the clean up crisis of the oil.

All of the students partnered up and started to try out their ideas, if they had any.

I then came up with the idea to use baking soda, which led to some good results, and which ultimately led to an expansion of the idea:

We discovered that baking soda would create tar balls for a long enough period of time that you could place something underneath them, collect them, and drag them out of the water in tact.

So then my friend and I tried placing nylon stocking on the oil to see if it would allow the oil to pass through, and it worked.

Nylon stockings allow the oil to seep through, but they block the clean water.

The result of our tests culminated in our final idea, which actually cleaned up the water to near perfect quality:

• Place the stocking on top of the oil (the oil passes through this porous barrier)
• Sprinkle baking soda on the stocking and the oil
• Wait up to one minute
• Pull the stockings out of the water, which collects the tar balls and leaves the water nearly completely clean

We tested this in class on a large scale and we were able to accomplish getting the water clean.

I hope this idea helps in the crisis and we wish you the best of luck!”