Perspectives on Innovation

Recently we challenged a team of students from Tufts to create a video in their own voice about what it means to be a problem solver. And to make it particularly challenging, we gave them no resources or guidance.  They’d have to make magic happen with only their creativity, energy, a video camera, and a PC for editing.

The final video, which they titled ‘Don’t let a good idea get away!’ blew us away.  It is fresh, humorous, and captures the power of that “Eureka!” moment all at the same time.

We were so encouraged by the Tufts students that we have decided to award special prizes for our 2012 Video Challenge to teams of College students.  We’ll award Solvers in three categories – best video overall, best video by a college student or team from the US and best video by a college student or team from outside the US. First prize will be $5000 – the 2 runners up will receive iPads. More details can be found in the Challenge statement here.

Kudos to the Tufts students who brought this video to life from all of us at InnoCentive!  We love the video and know InnoCentive community will as well!

Enjoy!

Dwayne Spradlin
InnoCentive CEO

Below is an excerpt from Chapter 6 of the the recently published “The Open Innovation Marketplace”, written by InnoCentive Founder Alph Bingham and CEO and President Dwayne Spradlin. In this chapter, the authors discuss the meaning of a Challenge, and reveal the 6 things that make a good Challenge.  The entire chapter is now available for download here.  For a limited time, Chapter 3 will also remain available, and can be found here.

“Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful.
Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening,
ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will
never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from
discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.”

—Sir Winston Churchill in Painting as a Pastime

Overview

Imagine every department with a clear picture of its needs, options, and work in process. Imagine each decision being made by managers bound to driving the optimal outcome regardless of where the resources reside. Imagine the vibrancy of an organization whose singular focus is driving performance excellence and not measuring success by patents issued, full-time headcount, or the size of its R&D budget. In such an organization, the CEOs agenda is that of the investor: How can the firm drive the best returns? The CFO not only tracks the business, he also manages risk and opportunity by measuring the effectiveness of all parts of the organization to deliver against its goals—in business and economic terms—with innovation held to the same performance standards as every other part of the organization.

Whether it is marketing, information technology, product development, or manufacturing, every department understands its problems and challenges and its various channels for problem solving, and has the skills to manage the process effectively, take action, and create solutions to drive enterprise value. Too often organizations measure their success by % of sales spent on R&D, how many patents they own, or whether the leading academics in their fields are on retainer. However, in today’s economy, these should all matter much less to the management of the organization or to the shareholders than whether they can get a new product to market before the competition and dominate the category or whether resources are being managed to ensure the firm can aggressively pursue new business opportunities when they emerge. The prevailing mentality of most established businesses slows, if not discourages, innovation while increasing its costs. Ultimately the shareholders pay the price.

Challenge Driven Innovation represents a dramatic evolution in enabling more effective, efficient, and predictable innovation. And our experience with businesses suggests there is enormous benefit simply in managers and employees better defining and managing their own problems. The transformational change, however, is accomplished through the remaking of the organization into the Challenge Driven Enterprise, where the most difficult problems can be solved, effort is aligned with strategic goals, all talent inside and outside of the organization is brought to bear to deliver on the mission, and sustained performance improvement is possible. The Challenge Driven Enterprise represents a new vision with far-reaching implications that can improve the speed, agility, and efficiency of business. It enables new modes of innovation while creating the flexibility to capitalize on new business opportunities. Industry leaders will be those that successfully apply these concepts universally, from business strategy to the manufacturing plant floor.

Read More:  Download this chapter by clicking here.

You know crowdsourcing has become mainstream when it is leveraged as a primary tool for selecting sessions and panels at an event/conference. Next year’s South by Southwest (SWSX) conference, an immensely popular event taking place in Austin Texas, features a “panel picker” that enables the crowd to cast a vote for the sessions they would like to see.

We’d like to engage our crowd to vote for a panel featuring the CEOs of  TopCoder and InnoCentive, Jack Hughes and Dwayne Spradlin, along with Jake Ward of Popular Science who will be moderating the panel.

The proposed panel, titled “Open Innovation: Millions of Us Solving Problems,” will discuss how open innovation and crowdsourcing can transform organizations, either through a breakthrough ‘eureka‘ idea or continuous and incremental improvement of a product or service. The panel will discuss what companies from Netflix to NASA to Toyota have gained from putting their biggest Challenges out in front of the general public, and how attendees can do the same. It will also uncover the key issues organizations need to address when incorporating open innovation communities into their own business plans, and how professional problem-solving communities will evolve in the coming years.

Please take a moment to register and vote!

By the way, as I was reading some of the comments on the registration page, I ran across this one from someone named John: “Interesting…crowd-sourced panel picking for a session on open innovation and crowdsourcing. Pretty appropriate I must say.”

We couldn’t agree more John.

Earlier this spring, InnoCentive Founder Alph Bingham and President and CEO Dwayne Spradlin released a groundbreaking book on open innovation, The Open Innovation Marketplace. We caught up with both of them this week to talk about how things were going with the book.

Congratulations on the success of your book. It’s been in the market for a few months now – how is it being received?

Dwayne: Thanks – we’re pretty excited about it. I think it’s being received well. I’ve been very intrigued to meet people at conferences and business meetings who say they’ve read it. It seems to be introducing a whole new language around the use of Challenges in innovating, and helping organizations understand how open innovation can impact them, how it can fit into what they do.

Alph: I’d say it’s been well received although it is just now thoroughly penetrating the distribution chain. Readers seem to appreciate the intersection of experience and theory on how these open innovation systems work.

Who are you finding are the biggest readers of the book? (more…)

I was privileged recently to be asked to participate as a subject matter expert on prizes and prize design for a video with Todd Park, CTO of the US Department of Health and Human Services, as well as others driving prizes within HHS. The video, embedded below, is intended to help educate HHS and all of its departments on the power of prizes as well as to encourage best practices. Todd and his team are taking a bold and sophisticated approach. Supported by President Obama’s Open Government initiative and the reauthorization of the America COMPETES Act this past year, HHS is targeting critical innovation needs, cost effective solutions, improved citizen engagement, and generating important learnings to be shared with other agencies in government adopting these approaches. We look forward to hearing about exciting new challenge and prize based programs coming out of HHS in the coming years!

The HHS website on Challenges and Competitions is an excellent information resource that will be valuable inside and outside of agency.