Perspectives on Innovation

As many of you may remember, in November 2008 InnoCentive ran an ideation Challenge looking for ideas for redesigning the InnoCentive website. The Challenge’s Summary stated: “InnoCentive is inviting Solvers to join its efforts in redesigning our website. We are asking Solvers to provide us with innovative and creative new design elements that we might integrate into the final website design.”

Now that the Challenge has wrapped, I asked the Challenge owner, Gabriel Eichler of InnoCentive Client Services, to tell us a bit about the results, and about his experience as a Seeker.

Gabe, how many Solvers did you award for this Challenge?

In the end we awarded three Solvers for contributions that were extremely impressive – both in terms of their creativity and the sheer amount of effort that they demonstrated.

Can you describe the winning submissions?

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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…)

I have some exciting news to share with you today.  As a result of all your feedback last year, we have multiple website updates planned this year.  The first update is now live and appears in the “My InnoCentive” area of the website.  For Solvers, this is the section of the website you see once you’ve logged in.  We focused on 5 key changes that we hope will make the website easier to use and more informative: (more…)

Hello.  My name is Elly Madrigal, and I am the Client Operations Manager at InnoCentive.  What does that mean?  Every day, I receive new orders for Challenges, review them, assign them to one of our Team members, establish metrics and statistics on our various delivery and success rates, and review these results with our Management and Clients (otherwise known as Seekers).

Since Solvers on our site have limited ability to view the “Big Picture” of the Challenge Lifecycle, I thought I’d paint that picture for you from my point of view.  The Challenge is not magically created and emailed to us from these big pocketed Companies (although I wish they were!)  They do require a significant amount of development time between InnoCentive Team members and the Seeker Challenge Owners (usually Scientists or Technical Managers).  In addition, there is a significant amount of time spent by the InnoCentive Team and the Challenge Owners reviewing your Submissions.  Solvers do not see this happening in the background, so I thought I’d tell you what we do when we’re not answering your questions or sending updates on your Submission.

We’ve arranged this process into 3 phases each with specific milestones and deliverables that mark the beginning and end of each phase.  Let me apologize in advance for the Project Management lingo, but I can’t help it.  So let’s dive in…..

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In this week’s InnoCentive Insider, Michael provides his insight on some not-so-obvious commonalities among successful InnoCentive Solvers.

I started out to write this post about the typical winning Solver. It was going to be about “Who are the typical Solvers winning awards and why are they successful?” It did not take me long to realize there is no “typical” winning Solver. Our award winners range from heads of large research organizations with plenty of support to single consultants who work alone.  Experience ranges from retirees with 30+ years of industrial experience to undergraduates who have only worked on one project. They have been in academics, industry, government, not-for-profit organizations, etc.  Winners can range from Nobel laureates to guys in tin-foil hats (I have no evidence of the last statement, but I like the mental image!)

Ok, so that was not really helpful, so I said, “What traits does the typical winning Solver have?” Well, they are very bright (obviously!), they tend to be thinkers, tinkerers and often quite analytical. They love to solve problems be it in Chemistry and Engineering or Crossword and Sudoku puzzles. They want to solve “real” problems and make an impact in the world. They want to help. They like to flex their “intellectual muscles” and even show off a bit. All interesting facts, but not really valuable to you, the Solvers. If you are reading this, you probably have most or all of these traits and I really have not told you anything new.

Hopefully, you are still reading this as I have found some interesting things that differentiate the winning Solvers from all other Solvers in my opinion. (more…)