Perspectives on Innovation

Economist’s The World in 2010 Conference

I recently participated in a panel discussion as part of the Economist’s The World in 2010 event in Washington D.C. Facilitated by Mathew Bishop, Business Editor of The Economist, the panel included: Dean Kamen (Founder, Segway), Kai Huang (Co-Founder, The Guitar Hero), and Rob Carlson (Principal, Biodesic). The panel focused on the state of innovation and predictions for the year. The conversation was both timely and lively. C-SPAN has repeatedly rebroadcast the panel. Worth a watch.

My Innovation Prediction for 2010? That policy makers would finally promote innovation to the forefront of their agendas, in the US and around the world. I noted that overhauls of the entire system are necessary in areas including patent law, immigration and work visa policy, education (particularly in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine), grant making and funding.

We have incredibly important work to do and profound problems to tackle, from curing diseases to climate change, and now is the time for governments to “get it right,” particularly in terms of the structural elements that enable and empower true invention and meaningful progress. Have we created a “land of opportunity” for scientists, inventors, universities, companies, and entrepreneurs? Do we have a culture of collaboration and information sharing? Or have we created an expensive and divisive system of trade secrets, laws, patents, and inefficient investment? The problems exist in academia and other areas as they do in the commercial space. Fresh and bold thinking is crucial and policy makers have an opportunity to offer real leadership.

Epilogue

Now, more than a month since the World in 2010 predictions were made, everyone’s attention is squarely focused on jobs and budget deficits. Clearly governments are faced with difficult choices. I sense that boldness and a willingness to champion a desperately needed innovation agenda will not be rewarded in Washington. Privately I hear that now may be the worst time to push change. Status quo.

In my opinion, courage and focus around innovation is absolutely vital. We need to invest heavily in planting the seeds of recovery and a vibrant future.  Innovation has always driven short and long term growth, INCLUDING jobs growth and GDP expansion. Now is precisely the time to implement a bold and strategic innovation agenda (investment and meaningful policy reform) in the US and around the world. Budget deficits notwithstanding, the “Inconvenient Truth” is that this is the only prudent and sustainable path forward and lawmakers need to step up now more than ever.

What do YOU think?

Last week our CEO Dwayne Spradlin issued a challenge on Twitter (he’s InnoCentiveCEO) asking everyone for their “best ever innovation one liners/quotes.” So today, I thought I’d ask all our blog friends for their “real world pearls of wisdom” on innovation.

Tell us in the comments!

Crowdsourcing continues to be the buzz word in the press and InnoCentive continues to be at the forefront in this new and exciting space, particularly in the areas of problem solving and innovation.  And while we’ve always recognized the power of this medium to be world changing, the precise role of the “Challenge” and its proper construction has been a subject of considerable discussion.

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

On October 19th, InnoCentive CEO Dwayne Spradlin was a guest on the CNBC series “The Business of Innovation” with Maria Bartiromo.  The segment was called “The Power of the Crowd” and centered on harnessing the collective wisdom of the masses to find answers outside the corporate culture of R&D.  One of Dwayne’s key points was that the right answers are usually found in unexpected places.  His point was illustrated with the examples of two prominent InnoCentive Solvers, Giorgia Sgargetta, from Perugia Italy, who solved the Challenge of turning dishwater blue when more soap was needed, and John Davis, who solved the Oil Spill Recovery Institute Challenge.  Giorgia is a chemist who lives in Italy and even though her Challenge was in the Chemistry discipline, she would not have othewise been tapped as a resource by this Seeker.

John Davis was even farther from the Seeker’s network – he was not in the oil cleanup and recovery business, and in fact knew very little about it.  However, he solved a Challenge that had plagued the oil and gas industry for over 20 years by applying experience he had gained while working as a consultant for a concrete company.

In addition to the profiles of John and Giorgia, the segment featured a video mashup that included the winning video from the 2008 InnoCentive video Challenge.  This video was created by InnoCentive Solver  John Michael Zervoulei, who certainly had no idea when he submitted it that that his work would be featured on a prominent news program on a major network!

If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth viewing – the clip can be found here.  The “Power of the Crowd” segment begins at 16:10.

Congratulations to John, Giorgia and John Michael.

This morning we announced a new offering – the InnoCentive Time Critical Challenge. The Time Critical Challenge was developed as a response to Seekers who needed immediate solutions, and compresses the Challenge cycle – from time to develop and post, running time of the Challenge, solution evaluation and IP transfer, to about 30 days.  Seekers have the option to review solutions as they come in, rather than waiting for the deadline.  If they find a Challenge that satisfies their needs, they can start implementation much faster.

What does this mean for Solvers?  Since Seekers are able to select a solution as soon as they find one that meets their needs, Solvers receive faster feedback on their solutions and are awarded prizes more quickly.  In a quote from CEO Dwayne Spradlin:

“Time Critical Challenges introduce an exciting new dimension to prize-based innovation. For some Challenges, solutions just can’t wait.  Time Critical Challenges offer the opportunity for Solvers to win premium awards over and above the base Challenge award amount for a solution submitted early– effectively creating a ‘race to the answer.’ This new incentive structure allows Solvers to be rewarded for both speed and accuracy in addressing our Seekers’ most urgent problems.”

We believe that these Challenges will benefit both Seekers and Solvers – look for them soon in a discipline near you!