Using the InnoCentive platform, organizations – companies, non-profits and government agencies – eager to take advantage of the distributed knowledge in the “wired world” are able to gain access to products, patents and solutions that are outside the confines of their own organizations. They post their pressing business problems – Challenges – on InnoCentive, ready to be solved by the “problem-cracking” individuals looking for opportunities to challenge their problem-solving skills and creativity, earn awards, enhance their confidence and achieve career independence and flexibility.

Top Solvers Yury Bodrov, Mounir Errami and Ahmet Karabulut are profiled, as well as winners Simone Sergi, Chris Wilmer and Grace Kepler. They talk about the Challenges they’ve won, their motivations for participating, and some very interesting observations about the “current state of open innovation” for those who can “think outside of the box.”

As CEO Dwayne Spradlin says, the InnoCentive methodology method “the right people to solve the right problem at the right time.”

A link to the article can be found here.

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.

One mapping concept that is helpful to use at this stage is the Epidemiologic Triad; that the interaction of the agent, host, and environment determines whether any given disease will occur. The underlying assumption of the Epidemiologic Triad is that there is rarely one thing that solely determines if someone will develop a disease. The corollary of this assumption for us Solvers is that we must always remember that there is rarely only one way to solve a Challenge. Looking at the various components that may be playing a role in the problem comprising any Challenge is a key factor in approaching how to solve the Challenge. The classic Epidemiologic Triad has long been used to more fully understand why a given disease develops. In addition to the life sciences, this epidemiologic approach is very helpful for many types of Challenges, including those in business, engineering and design, the physical sciences and the social sciences. When a Solver is first approaching a new Challenge, using the Epidemiologic Triad to systematically review the problem and map what is known about the problem under study helps the Solver get a better sense of where they are in the Challenge. This prepares the Solver to then explore variations of what is already known and to begin to discover completely new areas not on the current map.

So, for this discussion, think, “Challenge” whenever one sees “disease” and you will be on your way to submitting more winning solutions. The first part of the Epidemiologic Triad is the agent, which can be any biological, physical, or chemical entity associated with a disease. The host’s susceptibility to an agent is based on a variety of factors including personal characteristics such as age and sex, genetic predisposition, and personal behaviors engaged in by the host that may predispose the person to a given disease. The third component of the Epidemiologic Triad is the environment which includes those conditions that are not related to either the host or the agent, but do affect their interaction. Social, economic, and climatologic factors can be important in determining whether or not a disease develops.

For example, if one were trying to solve the Challenge of reducing motor vehicle accidents in a specific community, first mapping the different components that may be contributing to the problem would help one see where solutions may possibly be found. In this case, one could view the motor vehicle accident as the “disease.” The agent could be the car and different aspects of the car could include various safety features such as tire pressure and antilock brakes. The host is the driver, and different characteristics of the host could include age, driving history and sobriety of the driver. The environment could include road or weather conditions which could still have a strong influence on whether or not a motor vehicle accident will take place even if the car (agent) has great safety features and is being driven by someone (host) with a long history of driving and is sober.

To help the Solver in creating these maps, a variety of mind mapping tools are available, either as stand-alone programs or web-based applications. A list of mind mapping software, both free and proprietary can be found here.

In summary, applying the Epidemiologic Triad to more visually and systematically map a Challenge is a great way to develop more winning solutions. Try it out on your next attempt to solve a Challenge and see how new ideas and solutions can more effortlessly flow from the process. Good luck and have fun changing the world!

Harvey Arbesman, MD, MS
Marian Arbesman, PhD, OTR/R

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!