Perspectives on Innovation

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…)

Omar Parve has the distinction of being the first Estonian Solver to have won an InnoCentive Challenge. He was the winner of the “Isomeric Purity” Challenge.

I like such keywords as creativity, courageousness, independent positive personality.

My parents were veterinarians. My mother served as a chief veterinarian (“veterinary inspector”) of a county. I spent the first ten years of my life in a veterinary hospital because the family of the chief veterinarian was given lodging in a villa on the territory of the veterinary hospital. I participated everywhere and in everything, and “knew exactly” what kind of medicine had to be injected to a sick horse, cow or dog… I was allowed to watch all operations and observed how my parents and other experts were discussing diagnosis and making decisions about treatment.

My father had PhD degree in his veterinary field (related to horses) and had strong academic interests. He was always writing in the evenings and on weekends. He has written handbooks, a number of articles and chapters to university textbooks.

This experience I had in my childhood has been an important driving force behind my research interests. These are: medicinal chemistry, drug development, synthesis of active ingredients of medicines of very high stereochemical purity which sometimes allow unexpectedly efficient treatment. And one of the latest of these interests is elucidation of the role of lipases in natural sugar chemistry related to their ability to produce chemically active hydroxyaldehydes via decyclization of less active hemiacetals.

I remember having somewhat unexpectedly found an InnoCentive Challenge Bulletin in my mailbox in 2001. It was interesting reading material and I highly appreciated the free access to challenge details, but, unfortunately, until the end of August, last year, I was not an active solver.

In August 2009 a challenge on stereochemical problems caught my eye – it felt like a personal challenge. The Challenge details seemed attractive because of its clear, direct and honest style. I felt that due to my long-term experience in the field I could offer something useful to the seeker and the people working on this problem. Therefore I proposed my (awarded) solution.

InnoCentive has been a valuable medium, offering information about important problems in my own field of research as well as related fields. I find it inspiring for its multidisciplinary aspect. I feel having received a lot of useful information from InnoCentive and now, hopefully, I have given something back by solving a challenge. I am certainly interested in participating, together with InnoCentive and other solvers, in delivering more innovative solutions in the future.

When it comes to my hobbies, I have to mention the wonderful national parks of Estonia. I am fortunate enough to have a summer-house and some land in the oldest of them, Lahemaa National Park. Together with my classmates, I was one of the first employees of this national park in June 1971 when it was founded. We worked in the forest. Later I participated in restoring old windmills in the park. I absolutely enjoy the free time I spend there together with my family. Especially fantastic are the brown bears (wild) that come in fall to eat plums and apples in our garden. Visitors (other than bears) of Lahemaa may rent horses in several farms to have riding trips in such untouched environment near seashore in 70-100 km from Estonia’s capital of Tallinn.

On October 19th, InnoCentive CEO Dwayne Spradlin was a guest on the CNBC series “The Business of Innovation” with Maria Bartiromo.  The segment was called “The Power of the Crowd” and centered on harnessing the collective wisdom of the masses to find answers outside the corporate culture of R&D.  One of Dwayne’s key points was that the right answers are usually found in unexpected places.  His point was illustrated with the examples of two prominent InnoCentive Solvers, Giorgia Sgargetta, from Perugia Italy, who solved the Challenge of turning dishwater blue when more soap was needed, and John Davis, who solved the Oil Spill Recovery Institute Challenge.  Giorgia is a chemist who lives in Italy and even though her Challenge was in the Chemistry discipline, she would not have othewise been tapped as a resource by this Seeker.

John Davis was even farther from the Seeker’s network – he was not in the oil cleanup and recovery business, and in fact knew very little about it.  However, he solved a Challenge that had plagued the oil and gas industry for over 20 years by applying experience he had gained while working as a consultant for a concrete company.

In addition to the profiles of John and Giorgia, the segment featured a video mashup that included the winning video from the 2008 InnoCentive video Challenge.  This video was created by InnoCentive Solver  John Michael Zervoulei, who certainly had no idea when he submitted it that that his work would be featured on a prominent news program on a major network!

If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth viewing – the clip can be found here.  The “Power of the Crowd” segment begins at 16:10.

Congratulations to John, Giorgia and John Michael.

In an effort to improve your InnoCentive experience and get you the answers you need, we have made some upates to our Message Center.

You’ll be able to see the difference when you open your next project room – specifically, a logical division of sent vs. received messages.

To see the new Message Center, click on the Messages Tab or the Messages button on the right side of your project room. You will then be able to view messages for this Challenge from your Inbox or Sent tab. We think you’ll find this interface much easier to use.

As always, we value your feedback – please let us know if there is anything else we can do to enhance your InnoCentive Solving experience!

Attention InnoCentive Solvers!

Recommend a person who you think would like to be a Solver.  Someone who could create the next mosquito trap or enhance the next generation of BOGO lights for African villages. Or perhaps someone with creative ideas who loves to brainstorm about interesting concepts.  More Solvers mean more of the world’s Challenges can be solved and that means a bigger impact in the world.

The Solver who sends us the most new Solvers between August 1st and August 31st will not only win a check for $1,000 USD, but will also receive a $1,000 USD Global Giving Gift Card that can be used toward any charity on the Global Giving website.

Click on the button below to start referring Solvers. Get your contest referral link and forward to anyone you think would like to be a Solver. When friends or colleagues click on your link and register with InnoCentive, you’ll automatically get credit for referring them.

At the end of August, we will tally the number of Solvers referred, and the Solver who referred the most new registered Solvers will win the Send a Solver contest. The winner will receive a check for $1,000 and a $1,000 Global Giving Gift Card to donate to a Global Giving charity closest to his or her heart.

Sincerely,

The InnoCentive Team
www.innocentive.com

Please note the Send A Solver Contest (the “Contest”) is open to all registered Solvers (as defined in the InnoCentive Terms of Use ) who are legal residents of the 50 United States, the District of Columbia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia, age 18 years or older as of August 1, 2009. Void in Puerto Rico, Guam, The U.S. Virgin Islands, the Province of Quebec, and wherever taxed, prohibited or restricted by law. Employees (and their immediate families and household members) of InnoCentive, Inc. (the “Sponsor”) and its and their parents, subsidiaries, divisions, affiliates, participating vendors, distributors, advertising and promotion agencies and affiliated entities (collectively, the “Contest Entities”) are not eligible to win. By entering the Contest, entrants agree to accept and be bound by all terms of these Official Rules and Regulations (”Official Rules”).