I wanted to get a quick blog out today to share some big news: we have been working tirelessly for several months on redesigning our website – I’m pleased and excited to let you know our launch date is in sight, planned for later this summer!

The new site features improved flows, better and more content, and a complete new look & feel we think you’re going to love!

Solver Input: A couple weeks ago I sent an email to a large portion of our Solvers asking for help reviewing and testing aspects of the redesigned website and its content. We received more than two hundred responses within the first twenty-four hours.

Thank you to everyone who responded to the call!

With your input, we’re more excited than ever about the launch.

We’ll provide a more detailed summary of the changes as well as the launch date in a couple weeks.

Best,
JD

Ahmet Karabulut

I am a scientist with backgrounds in molecular biology and molecular genetics. I have been a member of the InnoCentive community for two years. Last year, I solved two theoretical-IP transfer Challenges and I was recently announced as one of the Top Solvers of 2009, along with twelve other people in five countries.

I first encountered InnoCentive through an article in the March 2008 issue of The Science Magazine during a coffee break in the lab, titled “Science and Commerce: Science by the Masses.” The “Science by the Masses” part of the title got my interest immediately. The topic was about open innovation and InnoCentive, Inc. The overall concept seemed like a very unique platform. After reading the article, I was skeptical at first even though it was published in one of the top journals in the world. Nevertheless, I went home that day and registered as a Solver to try and understand the article. I browsed through the open Challenges for a while and, out of curiosity, I submitted a couple of proposals to test myself. Several weeks later, I received serious feedback from the InnoCentive moderators and sincere responses from the Seekers. At the end, the proposal that I submitted for the Phenylephirine Stabilization Method Challenge was awarded.

Later on last year, I won another Challenge award with my submission for the Pd recovery and reuse from aqueous. After I got my second award for this submission, a follow-up Challenge emerged based on my solution. Thus, I have also seen firsthand that my idea is extended to the next level and a new Challenge emerged based on the previous one. With this Challenge, it appeared to me that open innovation had emerged, evolved and became feasible enough for company R&D teams to consider the InnoCentive platform as a standalone part of the troubleshooting and development process for continuous innovation.

I believe innovation emerges from a combination of individual/team creativity and well established problem solving skills. I also believe an incubation phase is required for the process.

The solutions for the Challenges that I was awarded came out spontaneously, similar to a  “Eureka” fashion as described by other Solvers. However I believe this did not happen all of a sudden. Basically, I had reviewed the Challenges in detail, understood the problem in depth and then re-imagined the experimental conditions for my solution. After an incubation phase, I had a solution that I believe would fulfill the solution requirements.

The most enjoyable part of the process was to know that the Seekers were carefully evaluating proposals from anonymous submitters with as much care as the Solvers who were participating. It was obvious that the proposals were reviewed in detail according to the quality of the ideas proposed and the suitability of the solution based on the Seeker’s demands. The whole process was also a very convincing experience for me to realize that this double blind process was indeed a wonderful opportunity for young scientists such as myself.

The InnoCentive team manages the process quite effectively so that the best results are achieved without the Seeker revealing any critical know-how secrets that would otherwise be a serious issue. Since the Seekers already have the background and knowledge to identify effective solutions for their problems, the open innovation approach helps to greatly speed up their R&D process and stimulates their innovation.

InnoCentive has already demonstrated the effectiveness of this concept numerous times, especially when R&D teams have exhausted their internal resources and/or when then they have time constraints to find the best solution for a specific problem. InnoCentive is a great platform both for the innovation Seekers and for the Solver scientists that are interested in providing their knowledge and creativity without any interference.

The success of the InnoCentive community for leading the open innovation concept is based on the emergence of what I believe is known as the “virtual lab tourism,” facilitated by the InnoCentive team. Basically, InnoCentive brings together the world’s most talented people, and lets the scientific experts from different research backgrounds virtually visit the R&D department of the innovation Seekers. These participating Solvers are allowed to provide solutions and recommend new ideas with absolute freedom. For a given Challenge, I am convinced that the best solution can easily come out of such interactions between the innovation Seekers and the Solvers with InnoCentive’s excellent management.

I have always been interested in the Challenges in scientific research and experimentation and I try to learn as much as I can from different scientific disciplines. I should say that I have an intrinsic hunger for information. I also get a lot of satisfaction when I have an opportunity to use such information in research and I have found this opportunity when I joined the InnoCentive community in 2008.

Thanks to InnoCentive for providing me such opportunity to have this fulfilling experience that I enjoyed greatly. I am now very happy to be a member of InnoCentive community and I will continue participating future Challenges.

Oil Spills.  Hurricanes.  Tsunamis.  Natural and man-made disasters are, by their nature, devastating and unpredictable.  But our response to them shouldn’t be.

If we’ve learned anything from the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it’s that great ideas aren’t enough to solve a catastrophic problem.  There must be a fast and efficient way to collect, vet, manage and mobilize solutions, personnel and the resources to solve the problem.  This is why we’ve created the Emergency Response 2.0 Pavilion – to provide a place for Solvers to apply their unique expertise when cataclysmic events occur.  This  pavilion is our commitment that if and when a disaster does occur, we’re ready to engage the best minds in the world to provide solutions, and to get those solutions to the people who can put them into action.

We’ll be adding functionality to this space over time, including news feeds and other resources, but for now, we’re using the Pavilion simply to house Challenges that need to be solved immediately.  For more information about specific crises, and to get the latest updates from agencies on the ground in disaster affected areas, click on the following links  -

Red Cross – http://www.redcross.org/

Deepwater Horizon Response Home Page – http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com

Crisis Commons – http://crisiscommons.org/

United States Environmental Protection Agency – http://www.epa.gov/

InnoCentive’s stand on the need for Emergency Response 2.0 – http://blog.innocentive.com/?s=emergency+response&x=21&y=13

We are excited about the latest update to our website: the new Challenge Center!

The Challenge Center is your one-stop for all open InnoCentive Challenges; we understand how important it is for you to easily navigate within this page, filter on Challenges that interest you and select the ones you want to work on. We believe the new Challenge Center has met all of those needs and more.

As soon as you launch the page you’ll see a listing of all the open Challenges. You can filter by Challenge type across the top of the listing by checking the boxes. There are additional filters on the left-hand side-bar by disciplines, pavilions, award amounts, submission types (individual or team submissions) and the ever important free-text search option. You can also sort the listed Challenges by posted date, deadline, challenge award and number of Solvers working on the Challenge.

Below is a snapshot of how the page looks:

For those who haven’t had a chance to visit the new Challenge Center, I highly recommend you check out the page – it’s quite cool, if I do say so myself. Plus you’ll find more Challenges to your taste more easily.

On this topic, I’ve come to what I believe is a deep insight:

Well constructed “Challenges” are an astonishingly powerful and uniquely effective tool for focusing the energies of people everywhere on the multitude of important problems in the world .

Let me explain how I came to that recognition.

The realization begins a few years ago with Professor Karim Lakhani from Harvard Business School and his study of InnoCentive titled “The Value of Openness in Scientific Problem Solving”.  Karim’s research resulted in two brilliant insights: 1) the diversity of InnoCentive’s distributed network is in fact its inherent strength for problem solving; and 2) Solvers participate for the following reasons:  to solve problems that matter, to be part of a community (and to be recognized within the community when they are successful), and for the prize itself.  This last point also speaks to my fundamental  belief that humans by their very nature need to problem solve, to break new ground, to climb Mount Everest.

Subsequent works from Karim and others have consistently confirmed the critical importance of the problem definition in InnoCentive’s Challenge based model and its success.  The problems must invite very diverse participation (you want entrepreneurs, mechanics, and chemists working on engineering problems, not just engineers) while focusing the Solver on the specific task at hand with as much context as possible (how do you explain an engineering problem to non engineers?).  As you can imagine, getting this right is incredibly important to sustaining high solution rates.

In 2008, I met Paul Carlile, a professor from Boston University with an unusual background in social and computer science and a gift for seeing the world through a systems lens.  Paul introduced me to the concept of Boundary Objects which sociologists use to describe powerful compartments of information which are both well defined and which translate naturally across communities and cultures.  We immediately realized that InnoCentive Challenges are Boundary Objects in every sense of the term.  Challenges articulate the need, describe the problem, specify success criteria, and establish the inducements.  This last point is critically important because the inducement telegraphs a (non zero) value to the world.  The best Challenges are universal and understood universally.

Now it is important to note that we believe it is the precision and care we take to define the Challenges that elevate them to the status of true Boundary Objects.  Our hallmark in this process is the understanding of how to manage the process to truly engage a highly distributed network and focus them to drive successful outcomes.  Well defined Challenges must ask the right questions (we strive for “pre inventive form” for you academics!).  We apply a meticulous attention to detail around understanding and articulating problems in concise ways.  Identifying the supporting information to give every Solver what they need to compete or team successfully.  Good Challenge design anticipates the audience and the conditions for effective engagement: Is the need for ideas, business plans, scientific or technological advancement?  Do I want the world to give me the idea or do I want them to demonstrate something physical?  Challenges must anticipate the cultural and legal realities of the world (e.g., is intellectual property an issue?).  What is the inducement to the network?  For a simple idea, a small reward may be sufficient, while a technological innovation may require a team to spend months of time and capital to develop a winning solution, requiring a substantial prize.  All of these things must be assembled into a Challenge before it is exposed to the world of problem solvers.

We have learned at InnoCentive that for the really big problems, it is essential to take a highly disciplined approach and to systematically refine the problems into more focused questions and ultimately to well defined Challenges .  For example, the big problem is not the need for a new drug for a neglected disease, it is the elimination and/or minimization of the human suffering caused by the disease.  The right questions might include: How do we limit transmission?  How can we cost effectively produce treatments that comprehend market based economics to ensure a sustainable model?  How do we distribute treatments in the developing world?  Even these questions require further decomposition until we get to well formulated challenges (E.g., Can we get 5X more vaccine into the hands of those that need it in the context of real world economic, cultural, and political constraints in Sub-Saharan Africa?).  The point is that focusing the energy of a human population on these crucial issues has always been possible, but requires process and tools to do so effectively.   Disciplined construction of the “Challenges” focus that human energy to drive results in ways never before possible.

The latest realization for me was attending the MIT Distributed Leadership Forum last week.  Put together by Professor Deborah Ancona (author of X Teams) of MIT, the Forum explored a number of important questions:  How do we empower leaders everywhere in organizations?  What are the implications of new organizational structures as we see destruction of the old established paradigms?  What tools can enable distributed leadership and work?  Presentations ran the gamut, from Alph Bingham, InnoCentive’s Founder, making vivid the need for organizations to think differently, to organizers of the Obama campaign team describing how they engaged millions in the campaign to win the oval office (a well defined challenge!), to Jim Parker, ex CEO of Southwest Airlines, describing how shared mission, passion, and empowerment built a world class airline and a truly winning culture.  Remember President Kennedy in the 60’s challenging a country to put a man on the moon in ten years?  I listened to example after example of exceedingly well defined goals and innovative empowerment structures enabling stunning outcomes inside and outside of traditional organizational paradigms.  One message was clear, empowering and enabling new forms of work and leadership may be crucial to solving many of the challenges facing our society today and while those forms are quickly evolving, the tools for organizing and distributing the effort are  just beginning to be understood.

So with thanks to many brilliant people along the way, it all came together for me.  There is an Art and Science to “Challenges” which allow them to effectively harness the wealth of human creatively and inventiveness.  This Art and Science is not only key to understanding InnoCentive’s success, it is crucial to enabling the kinds of distributed world changing problem solving we need to see in this century.

Whether it is the quest to eliminate suffering from a neglected disease, or accelerating research for sustainable energy sources, or putting a man on the moon, it is clear that Challenges have a powerful role to play in changing the world.  This is the promise of Crowdsourcing and the “Challenge” is the precision instrument that enables its full potential.

I invite your feedback and thoughts.  In fact, consider it a Challenge!

Dwayne Spradlin
CEO, InnoCentive