Perspectives on Innovation

Gregg A. Micinilio recently won the Challenge Communication Platform to Connect Vulnerable Communities with Climate Change Solutions. Previously, he was awarded for Design of a Solar Water Treatment System based on TiO2 Nanoparticles and Detecting and Indicating Signs of Discomfort (in partnership with Sean Lukan).

This was a Challenge completely out of the realm of my area of expertise as an Industrial Designer; however, I was so intrigued by the complexity and the global need of the project that I could not walk away from it. Putting my talents to use in a humanitarian cause is an incredibly humbling and rewarding experience and I was motivated by the fact that some of my ideas could possibly, in a small way, be put to use to help a world desperate for solutions.

The World Resources Institute (a global environmental think tank which works with governments, companies and civil society to build solutions to urgent environmental challenges) had initiated this Challenge to create a communication platform to connect vulnerable communities with climate change solutions. The requirements for solutions were not limited for use in just 1st world communities, but had to be broad enough to encompass ideas for 3rd world countries as well. A link was required between businesses, governments, and local communities, which would create an infrastructure game plan to attack climate change issues.

My solutions encompassed the use of inexpensive technologies such as cell phones and cell phone apps, and free social media to simplify and track the flow of information. I also created meaningful incentives for business and academia to offer solutions beyond just feel-good humanitarian charity, and introduced a more lucrative and enticing program where everyone would walk away having gained something real.

As a product designer I tend to think in pictures, and as this was a written proposal, I really struggled to get all of my ideas into a coherent format. I leveraged the strength of my day to day job of creating communication links between different disciplines, such as marketing and engineering, and applied that to the given Challenge. Approaching this problem as I would any other engineering or design project, I researched and gathered as much information as possible, identified the different groups of people involved, mapped a path to the most efficient/economical solutions; then I found technologies to link all the elements together. The final steps were to look beyond the obvious and to creatively expand solution directions, then figure out how I could reach desired results as inexpensively as possible, without losing value (”cost downs” in the product design field).

I have found that the more I branch out into areas outside of my career path, the more successful my solutions are in my own area of expertise. I truly appreciate the InnoCentive format of anonymous submission of proposals in which the Seeker looks at just the ideas and judges the work on its own merit–an innovative and fair idea that we often don’t see in the business world!

I would love to reach out to other Solvers in other disciplines to do a group project. 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.

Adrian Perez won the Challenge Communication Platform to Connect Vulnerable Communities with Climate Change Solutions.

Currently I live in Savannah, Georgia, USA. I moved to Savannah from Honduras for tertiary schooling at the Savannah College of Art and Design. My academic specialty is the built environment with specific interests in systems thinking, interaction design, and sustainability.   Upon completion of my schooling, I moved to Kenya where I was doing work with the United Nation Human Settlements Programme under the Disaster Management Programme looking into subjects such as appropriate technologies, human displacement, and climate change. I eventually returned to Savannah and became involved with an organization called the Emergent Structures Projects (ESP). ESP’s mission is to increase the value and accessibility to building material waste streams through facilitation, collaboration, education and advocacy.

I heard about InnoCentive at a lecture by Jonah Lehrer titled “How We Decide”. He spoke about how the human mind comes to a moment of epiphany, a solution; he talked about how out-of the-box thinking is a product of interdisciplinarity, open-mindedness and moments of rest.  In discussing this subject matter, he mentioned InnoCentive.com. I remember making a mental note of this for future investigation. I have since been a loyal frequenter to the site.

On one of these ‘frequent visits’ I found a Challenge posted by the World Resource Institute for creating a communication platform to connect vulnerable communities to climate change solutions. As I read through it, I became excited, as I was able to relate to certain thematic areas due to my previous experiences in Kenya. Shortly after, I began doing my research on the three main subjects of the challenge: climate change, communication platforms and human vulnerability. Over time, I began to form parallels between the three subjects and eventually began presenting my ideas to friends over coffee. After much frustration, moments of rest and a fast approaching deadline, a final idea was decided on and submitted. After that, one can only wait. It wasn’t after losing hope that I received a congratulations email from InnoCentive.

I find that InnoCentive reflects the spirit of the age; it takes advantage of today’s connectivity, allowing for disassociated and wildly diverse input of human experience, targeting the same problem, equating to well-rounded, inclusive solutions. Thank you InnoCentive!

Ivan Skachko won the InnoCentive Challenge Mechanical Joint with High Ultrasound Conductivity.

PhD in Physics, Rutgers University, NJ, USA
MS in Physics Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Moscow, Russia

Starting from high school I faced the dilemma whether to become an engineer or a physicist. I chose the latter because it seemed to me essential to get a good understanding of physical laws for either path. Eventually I understood that my true passion is designing and building things as well as solving engineering challenges. While these inclinations were of some value in my career as experimental condensed matter physicist, I was never able to apply them to a full extent. The difficulty I faced when trying to switch to something more applied, is that the employers were usually seeking for a set specific relevant skills. My assumption — that with a solid background in physics I can do anything — seemed to be disproved.

And then, reading Nature journals, I noticed InnoCentive Challenges. These I can just play with! Ideation (I did not know such word exists) is what I often tend to do. I picked the Challenge “Mechanical Joint with High Ultrasound Conductivity“ because even though I had no direct experience with ultrasonic waves, the wave phenomena are very similar whether they are electromagnetic waves or sound. I was majoring in optics as an undergraduate, and was using radio-frequencies in my PhD work. I also have interest in mechanical engineering: I greatly enjoy working in machine shop or repairing my car or doing CAD. Surely I learnt a great deal about ultrasound while working on the Challenge.

I think that it is not a specific expertise that is crucial for solving problems but a special connection that is created between Solver and the Challenge. I am eagerly anticipating my next Challenge on InnoCentive.

Patrick Fuller recently won the Nitrate Capture System Challenge sponsored by the Environmental Defense Fund.

I am currently a Ph.D. candidate in chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern University, collaboratively working on a variety of computational and experimental projects. This work ranges from green energy to catalysis, but all of my projects share one common goal: improving the global standard of living through the design of applied technology.

As an undergraduate at Lehigh University, I discovered my interest in creating “actionable” technology while researching improvements in orthopedic implants. The work in itself was very interesting, but I noticed that there was no infrastructure available to aid in converting successful research into commercial products. To fill this niche, I worked toward and obtained a second degree in finance. This skillset has helped me immensely over the last few years, and I have already found myself useful as a bridge between scientific and business communities.

I learned about InnoCentive through Chris Wilmer, another Ph.D candidate in my department. Come to think of it, this all probably started because his lab has an excellent coffee machine. Weird how that works.

This was my first challenge, which I took up within a few days of discovering InnoCentive. I have since considered a variety of other challenges—even working on experimental data for some—but have only submitted one other solution.

I was immediately drawn toward the nitrate capture problem posed by the Environmental Defense Fund. While my academic background helped, most of the inspiration came from my upbringing. I was raised in a coastal New England town, where oceanography was a large portion of our grade school education. This was coupled with my experience in high school of working in a produce market, where I met farmers using nitrate-consuming algae to fertilize their crops. Following this up with some elementary reaction kinetics, I was able to devise a theoretical solution to nitrate capture. I have since been in contact with the Environmental Defense Fund, and I hope to work with them in testing and implementing my idea!

Corinne Le Buhan was recently selected as the winner of The Economist-Innocentive Human Potential Index Challenge. In addition to the $10,000 award, Corinne was invited to present her solution at The Economist Ideas Economy: Human Potential conference in New York in September 2011. You can view her full solution here, and her presentation here.

How did you hear about InnoCentive and why did you become an InnoCentive Solver?

Curiosity brought me to Innocentive in the first place. As a freelance consultant in intellectual property and innovation management, I wanted to better understand how innovation crowdsourcing works in practice and what new opportunities it enables for my customers. This approach is not very well known yet and is often feared because of the loss of control it seems to imply, but that can be addressed with the right framework and process. So, I registered as a Solver to test it… and ended submitting an ideation Challenge on my own simply because it was inspiring me.

Have you attempted other InnoCentive Challenges?

So far, I have not attempted other Innocentive Challlenges, but I did consider a few. It’s a lot of work to compile a good proposal. You need to gather the relevant part of your background knowledge, you need to devote some time to further explore what other solutions already exist elsewhere and enrich your thinking accordingly, and then you still need to articulate your nascent ideas as clearly as possible to formalize a suitable answer to the Challenge requirements. This process is somewhat similar capturing a technical invention into a good patent description and claims… you need significant quiet time to think and write about it! So I can only work on Challenges when I have enough free time left besides my day-to-day business.

What motivated you to work on the Challenge that you ended up winning?

What particularly motivated me to devote extra-hours building an answer to the Human Potential Index Challenge was its larger purpose and meaning than what I’m usually working on. In my humble view, GDP-based metrics are depressing the whole western economies in a schizophrenic way as we grow GDP at the expense of other goals such as environmental preservation. Still, I personally have the opportunity to interact with a number of creative and positive-minded engineers who have not given up their faith in mankind capability to design new technologies, even if sometimes just for the fun of it. So I thought there must be a way to better capture that, as a human potential index measurement, than with GDP-derived metrics, and that where I started from.

What do you like about working on Challenges?

I like working on almost anything, and Challenges are even more rewarding because it is a creative work. I also like more and more being able to connect and share knowledge from very different fields as my life experience and understanding develops. Challenges like the one I submitted provide a very good opportunity to do so.

What would you like to see happen with your solution?

I now try to integrate my proposal into a larger initiative. I’m using the visibility it gave me to connect to other people with the same concerns and hopes on the need for a better human potential development measurement. I think there’s room for further formalism and prototyping from real data in this area, but this requires funding of some sort. Ideas that are not implemented in the end are just ideas, not innovations… that’s nice, but a bit worthless. I hope we can move to the next step, and have already started to connect to other Challengers to evaluate if there’s enough momentum to further build something concrete out of our respective ideas, expertise and networks.

You can read Corinne’s bio at http://www.ipstudies.ch/about/