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.
Today’s guest post is provided by InnoCentive Top Solver Harvey Arbesman, and his wife Marian Arbesman. Harvey won the Discovery Prize and the Thought Prize in the Prize4Life ALS Challenge. Harvey and Marian are innovation consultants who in 2002 founded ArbesIdeas, Inc., a research and consulting company devoted to innovation in the life sciences. They’ll be contributing to this blog from time to time as part of our “Help a Solver Succeed” series. Harvey and Marian’s previous post, A Systematic Approach to Defining the Challenge for a Winning Solution, can be found here.
To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.
Albert Einstein
Maps are amazing – whether one is taking a trip or trying to locate a specific store in the mall, maps can help you find out where you are, and the best way to get where you are trying to go. In addition, by stepping back from the details of the map, you can understand the big picture of the journey you are taking.
Mapping is also very useful during the process of understanding a Challenge that you are trying to solve. Plotting the relationships among various factors involved in a Challenge can help establish clarity regarding the problem. It also stretches one’s thinking and promotes the development of new thought patterns and connections between established areas. (more…)
Today’s guest post is provided by winning InnoCentive Solver Harvey Arbesman, and his wife Marian Arbesman. Harvey won the Discovery Prize and the Thought Prize in the Prize4Life ALS Challenge. Harvey and Marian are innovation consultants who in 2002 founded ArbesIdeas, Inc., a research and consulting company devoted to innovation in the life sciences. They’ll be contributing to this blog from time to time as part of our “Help a Solver Succeed” series.
“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody else has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought.” Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
What’s your vision for solving a Challenge? Before you start working on a new project, how do you imagine yourself tackling the Challenge? Some people may imagine themselves struggling and toiling away in the middle of the night, while others see themselves walking along a windswept beach waiting for the moment when a great solution seems to come out of nowhere. I’d like to share with you our approach for taking on and defining new Challenges, one that combines a variety of proven techniques for increasing innovation. While we may not be able to help you get around working in the middle of the night, and we definitely can’t provide the beach, we can help you with a streamlined and systematic approach that can take away some of the angst of finding new solutions and hopefully even make it fun.
The InnoCentive Solver community is enormous and diverse. Not only are Solvers found all over the world, but also they come from many different disciplines and have varying levels of expertise solving complex problems. This blog targets many different kinds of Solvers: people interested in solving a problem who need some help to get started; those who have previously submitted solutions (and maybe even won), but would like some help making it happen more quickly; and those who are novices in a given area and need some ideas for how to get started. (more…)
In today’s installment of “Help a Solver Succeed” (HASS), where we ask InnoCentive experts to provide resources that they think might be helpful to you in solving Challenges, Marilyn Toomey introduces OpenOffice.org.
As a member of Client Services, I spend a lot of time scanning and organizing the many submissions received for our posted Challenges. When asked to blog about a service or technology that might be of interest to our Solver community, my first thought was “OOOOOOO”….. sort of like when you are excited and don’t know what to say!! In this case, I know exactly what to say, so I’m going to shorten my “OOOOOOO” to OOo (OpenOffice.org) which is the official name of the open source office suite called Open Office.org.
What is OpenOffice.org?
I was first introduced to OpenOffice.org by my husband and we have used it on our home computer ever since. It’s a free downloadable suite of applications that includes a document editor, a spreadsheet, presentation software, a graphics tool and a database. I know some of our Solvers are using OpenOffice.org as some of our submissions come in with a .odt extension. While Open Office defaults to saving documents using the .odt extension, it also can read and write files that are created by many existing software products. By using the Save As command from the tool bar, a document can be saved in various formats that can be read by all the popular office suites. It’s easy to learn and can be used for any purpose by just about anyone. There is one interface where you can start what you want ….a new document, new spreadsheet, new presentation, new drawing or new database from the same dropdown list. In addition to offering great products and applications, there is a whole open source community developing improvements and modifications to the code. Anyone can report a bug or offer enhancements. It all seems to be a meritocracy so start contributing and you will get recognized.
Did I mention, it’s free?
When I first started using computers I used “free” software to sell the expensive hardware we were offering so I am sort of attached at the hip to “free” software. The price is right. You can find the download at http://www.openoffice.org. OpenOffice.org is in its third version, has always been reliable when I have used it, and is currently celebrating its ninth birthday! It works on multiple platforms and is available in 80 different languages!
Another great free tool
Before writing this blog I was familiar with the OpenOffice.org document writer and spreadsheet. I didn’t know they had a graphics tool and so I was also going to suggest XnView, which can be downloaded at http://www.xnview.com/en/download.html. XnView is also a free download for private, non-commercial, or educational use. I really enjoy using this graphics tool for my photographs and would suggest it to all, even if you’re already using the graphics tool in OpenOffice.org. It’s a pretty cool tool to have in your pocket. However, I am now going to explore the Draw tool in OpenOffice.org to see what it has to offer! I’d love to hear from other people who have tried this application – please let me know if you are an OpenOffice user and if you use the Draw feature!!!
This is the first in our Blog Series “Help a Solver Succeed” (HASS), where we ask InnoCentive experts to provide resources that they think might be helpful to you in solving Challenges. Today’s post is from Innovation Development Manager Gabriel Eichler, who is a member of our Client Services team.
Our blogging team has asked me to write a piece for the first issue of the “HASS – Help A Solver Succeed” blog series. This section is dedicated to profiling enabling technologies, services or information that may help our Solvers be more successful at either Solving our problems or be more productive at doing your own work on a daily basis.
Since my educational background and Challenge writing specialty is almost exclusively focused on computational, bioinformatic or statistical Challenges I find it apt to write about a programming language. I have decided to dedicate my HASS entry to the programming language R.
I came to know R during my PhD research at the US National Cancer Institute. Previously I had written extensive amounts of code in Matlab – my previous programming language of choice for rapid prototyping or computational experimentation. Though Matlab has a more sophisticated look and feel, and I knew it quite well, I was instructed that learning R would be essential to my graduate studies. Digging in I learned that R was first distributed in the spring of 1997 by Robert Gentlemen and Ross Ihaka and it resembles the closed source, commercial language S in many ways. However, from the beginning Gentelmen and Ihaka have made R an open source language that thrives off a community of volunteer developers. From nearly the very beginning, R has maintained the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) resource for everyone to publish their own R extensions or libraries. This brilliant step quickly made R a force to be reckoned with.
I find R to be the best way to quickly model statistical questions, create powerful graphs or even super compute a difficult but parallelizable problem. The interface and kernel are extremely lightweight so your computer is left with maximal resources to compute on what you want. Beyond that, the CRAN resources make R an even more powerful resource because thousands of people have created hundreds of packages meant to assist you in performing complex tasks. In fact, in my nearly 3 years of continual use of R, I have rarely (if ever) encountered situations in which I actually had to write complex procedures for any standard statistical or machine learning algorithm. For example, I was able to develop a multiprocessed, Random Forest based algorithm using mostly code pulled from CRAN.
In summary, I’m a huge fan of the R programming language. If you haven’t already done so I would encourage you to download a free copy and play around with it. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not as slick as a commercial package such as Matlab or S, but the power of open source has elevated R to be one of the most useful and valuable languages around. Plus, isn’t it kind of cool to participate in InnoCentive’s Crowdsourcing process by using a resource that is, in and of itself, a product of Crowdsourcing?
Gregg A. Micinilio has won three Challenge since becoming a Solver in 2010
"If you have not entered a solution before, I urge you to do so. Even if you have just a tingle of an idea; pursue it, work it through, run it through a sieve and post it. I have lost more Challenges than I have won but I always come away intellectually expanded."
Today’s guest post is provided by winning InnoCentive Solver 
In today’s installment of “Help a Solver Succeed” (HASS), where we ask InnoCentive experts to provide resources that they think might be helpful to you in solving Challenges, Marilyn Toomey introduces OpenOffice.org.
This is the first in our Blog Series “Help a Solver Succeed” (HASS), where we ask InnoCentive experts to provide resources that they think might be helpful to you in solving Challenges. Today’s post is from Innovation Development Manager Gabriel Eichler, who is a member of our Client Services team.
