Perspectives on Innovation

We’ve been talking to you quite a bit recently about communication – and our desire to share and be more open with you, and hopefully to encourage you to tell us about yourselves.  As part of this initiative, I wanted to let you know about a few more things we’ve been working on.

We announced recently that we’ve added RSS feeds to our site.  This is something that may seem a long time in coming, but we wanted to ensure that they were really going to be useful – and as customizable as you might want them to be.  We hope that the options we’ve provided will allow you to keep up on only the things that are most interesting to you, including Challenges of a specific type, all open Challenges, or the latest news on our blog.

We’ve launched a new discussion board, specifically for the IAVI Challenge.  Click the “talk” bubble to access this area.  We’re working on making discussion boards much more widely available – look for more of these in the near future.

Finally, in a move that had some of my colleagues scratching their heads, I’ve decided to provide you with more information than ever about the inner workings at InnoCentive – starting with a glance at Solver demographics.  We talk quite often about the diversity of our marketplace, and I feel strongly that we have built a community that is unparalleled in this respect.  I’m proud to be able to back this statement up with some real data.  In the future, I plan to share even more of this type of information, and would be interested in hearing from you about what you’d most like to learn.

Stay tuned for more on this front, and please let us know what you think – how are we doing?

by Elly Madrigal, Client Operations Manager

 Due to a high demand from Solvers, InnoCentive has launched another form of communication to allow Solvers and Seekers discuss Topics around a specific Challenge.  You may have noticed that there is a new button on the IAVI Challenge, “Functional envelope trimer of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus” (located under the Global Health Pavillion), called “Discuss Challenge”.  Specific Topic areas in this forum include: (1) an Introduction to IAVI, (2) Funding, (3) Collaboration, (4) Prizes, and (5) Confidentiality, plus any other Topics that you may want to discuss.  We invite you to take a look at the forum and add to the discussion if you have any questions or comments around the Challenge and/or the IAVI organization. 

For those of you that have not been involved in a Forum, it is basically a message board for Solvers and Seekers to communicate with each other.  Typically, information is communicated in one direction, through the Challenge posting and Press Releases.  However, with the Challenge Forum, Solvers can now ask questions directly to the Seekers, but with some caveats…..we’ll get into those caveats below.

For those of you that have been involved in a Forum, please no trolling, spamming, flaming, baiting, sock puppeting, double posting, or foul language.  You’ve seen it before.  (more…)

InnoCentive recently announced the posting of one of the most ambitious Challenges we’ve seen to date – posted by the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI). The objective of this Challenge is to further the development of an HIV/AIDS vaccine.  I asked Kalpana Gupta, Ph.D., Director, New Alliances & Initiatives at IAVI to provide a bit of insight into the current state of HIV/AIDS vaccine development and the importance of this particular Challenge to that effort. 
 

Hi Kalpana – thanks for answering my questions today.  Can you tell me about the general state of the search for a vaccine for HIV/AIDS?

Hi Connie.  Although HIV was discovered to be the virus that causes AIDS 25 years ago, the effort to develop a preventive AIDS vaccine has only been a robustly funded initiative in the last decade. In that time, we have seen a tremendous surge in political and financial support for AIDS vaccine development. We have also seen a steady stream of incremental advances that provide the foundation for the AIDS vaccine development efforts now underway across the globe.  (more…)