Perspectives on Innovation

The World Resources Institute (WRI), a global think tank that works with organizations to help solve urgent environmental challenges, recently completed an InnoCentive Challenge aimed at helping local communities across the globe adapt to changing climate conditions.  We talked with Eliot Metzger at WRI about the Challenge and the winning Solutions.

Hello Eliot.  Thanks for coming back to tell us about your completed Challenge.  Perhaps you can start by reminding our readers about the goals of the Challenge.

One of our primary goals at WRI is to help people adapt to the impacts of climate change and advance innovative solutions that prevent further damage to the global climate system. With this Challenge, we were seeking creative ideas for communicating local needs in communities dealing with climate challenges they have never seen before.

Communities across the globe are confronting more extreme weather, like heat waves, droughts, and floods.  They also are facing more subtle and long-term impacts, which can be equally disruptive. Sea level rise is one well-known example, but there are also food and health risks as a changing climate creates conditions for increasing pest populations or insect-borne disease.

These are global and regional disruptions creating new needs at a local level. A community in Ghana may be looking for new energy sources to compensate for the hydroelectric power supply that is less reliable because of changing rainfall patterns. A coastal community in Vietnam may be in need of infrastructure to deal with increasing tidal floods because of rising sea levels.

We asked for ideas that could leverage new communication models and advances in information and communication technology to meet these needs. Our challenge to the InnoCentive Solvers was to come up with ideas for a communications platform that linked communities, governments, and companies. We want to see information flow from the local level to inform new approaches for national-level decision making and new goods and services from the business community.

This was an Ideation Challenge, and you made four awards.  Tell us your thinking about that decision.

Well, first of all it was difficult to pick just one idea.  There were several that stood above the rest.  And among those, each offered something slightly different.  I can’t say that any one of the solutions we reviewed had exactly what we were looking for, but nearly all the proposals had at least a few interesting ideas.

There were four ideas that were particularly comprehensive, creative, and still quite practical. We decided to recognize and reward each of those Solvers. It was nice to have the flexibility to spread the award money among several good ideas.

Can you share with us some of the most compelling ideas that were awarded? (more…)

Today we announced a new collaboration with the world renowned Cleveland Clinic, to advance medical and healthcare innovation.  The cornerstone of the partnership is the Cleveland Clinic Medical Innovation Pavilion, which will be home to a series of Challenges aimed at providing new advances in patient care.  Dr. Paul DiCorleto, Ph.D., Sherwin-Page Chair of the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute, led the initiative from the Cleveland Clinic side, bringing together a team of basic and clinical researchers with the aim of reaching outside of the traditional innovation process to uncover new ideas that could change the way the world approaches medical research.  We asked Dr. DiCorleto to give us his thoughts about the partnership and the role of open innovation in health care.

Hello Dr. DiCorleto, and thank you for speaking with us today. Can you tell us a bit about Cleveland Clinic and the mission of the Lerner Research Institute?

Cleveland Clinic is unique in that from its very beginning in 1921, the founders believed that research and education belonged with clinical care.  These elements remain in our mission statement today, and research is viewed as an integral part of patient care.  At the Lerner Research Institute, our goal is to understand the underlying causes of human diseases and to develop new treatments and cures.

Cleveland Clinic is a world renowned research institute.  Can you tell us about some of the specific innovations that have been developed since the organization’s founding? (more…)

We recently had a news mention from the unlikeliest of venues – ESPN! I’m sure many of you will say the same thing we did: “ESPN, the sports network? How is that relevant?” Well, innovation is relevant in all avenues of life, and that includes business, leisure and professional sports. This brings us to ESPN, and the author’s interest in innovation, crowdsourcing and prizes.

The author begins the article with “top-tier surfing” contests at Bells Beach and Rio’s Billabong Pro, Lowers Pro’s “MVP,” Nike 6.0’s “Cash for Tricks” and Volcom’s “kick-flip on camera” challenge, where she has witnessed surfers driven to produce some “performance evolution” kicks, flips and other tricks. She notes that besides the adrenaline-rush and the chance to perform in front of their peers, cash prizes do not hurt in encouraging them to come up with innovative new moves. And why stop there she asks. Why not “ask” or crowdsource innovation within the rest of the surfing industry, like seamless, slimmer, resilient wetsuits and environmentally friendly and surfboard materials and a host of other inventions and enhancements.

Hence, the mention of InnoCentive, crowdsourcing and prize-based innovation; while the idea of prize-based innovation isn’t new, she credits the World Wide Web and InnoCentive with accelerating the use of crowdsourcing and cash prizes for “linking regular people with ideas to problems.” Have a read – the article is so well written and you don’t have to be a surfer to understand and enjoy it!

Anjai Lal and Sahsa Vyash are the the winners of the third Economist-InnoCentive Challenge, The Economist-InnoCentive Entrepreneurship Challenge. They presented their winning plan at The Economist’s Ideas Economy: Innovation Event on March 23-24 in Berkeley, CA. This blog post is by Anjai.

I am currently a second year MBA student at the Yale School of Management. I graduated from Indian Institute of Technology in 2006 with a major in Electrical Engineering. Thereafter, I worked with British Telecom as a consultant where I was primarily involved in strategy and planning. At BT, I held a cross functional profile that spanned around Crisis Management, Strategy, Technology, Finance and Project and Vendor Management. I am passionate about the telecom/technology sector and am extremely interested in the emerging markets. I will graduate from Yale School of Management in May, 2011.

At Yale, my interests lie in Strategy, Finance and Technology. I spent the last summer with Zephyr Management, a Private Equity fund in NYC. I also interned with IBM in Business Performance Services. I head the South Asian Business Forum at the School of Management and am also a member of the organizing team of Asia Tomorrow- Yale’s premier student run conference. (more…)

HP recently released a news advisory highlighting the results of a fascinating innovation survey that the company commissioned. (The global survey included interviews with 312 executives in both commercial enterprises and the public sector during February and March 2011).

Some of the report highlights include:

1. Ninety-eight (98) percent of the executives surveyed believe that innovation will be critical to the success of their organizations over the next five years.
2. The most important reason to innovate is to facilitate future organizational growth (79% of respondents). For commercial enterprises, the second most important reason to innovate is to support profitability (74% of respondents); for the public sector, reputation is the second most important reason to innovate (59% of respondents). InnoCentive’s work with public sector organizations (e.g., Air Force Research Labs, NASA, In-Q-Tel and the intelligence community) in particular reveals that they are serious about finding solutions to problems that matter most to their missions, advocating public-private partnerships, and promoting transparency, openness, and collaboration across agencies.
3. Thirty-five (35) percent of organizations do not appear capable of measuring the success of their innovation efforts. This number is somewhat troubling and is probably low. Establishing a measurement framework with feedback loops and regular milestone checks should be a key deliverable for all open innovation programs and projects.
4. The majority of executives interviewed believe that they are innovation leaders in their respective industries, with 74% of CEOs indicating said leadership. Since the majority of respondents also indicated that CEOs are most responsible for guiding innovation efforts, it’s not surprising that the majority of CEOs self-report leadership.
5. Inadequate funding and technology were recognized as significant barriers to innovation. I’ll go ahead and add a few one more: A lack of methodology, process, discipline, and expertise. InnoCentive’s unique methodology, Challenge Driven Innovation, is an innovation framework that accelerates traditional innovation outcomes by leveraging open innovation and crowdsourcing along with defined methodology, process, and tools to help organizations develop and implement actionable solutions to their key problems, opportunities, and challenges. The key point is: Methodology matters.

Overall, some thought-provoking data courtesy of HP.