Perspectives on Innovation

Leia este post em português. I am an IT Manager with around 18 years of IT experience. During this time, I worked as a software engineer in government departments, as an IT consultant for the United Nations and, during the last few years, as an IT manager in a multinational company. I live with my wife in Porto Alegre, south of Brazil.

The good thing about innovation is that everyone is always trying to reach it or work with it. You will never see someone saying something like “My job is very boring – all we do is innovate and innovate”. As a manager, I know how important is to stimulate people to think “outside-of-the-box”, to innovate, and to find new ways to do things (sometimes, new ways to do the same task). Innovation not only results in ideas that can solve problems in an easier way, but it encourages people to keep learning and stay self-motivated in their day-to-day activities.

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Today at SAP’s TechEd event in Las Vegas – SAP announced that they will be collaborating with us to launch a Pavilion, as well as to invest in our business. They have sponsored a new Pavilion on our site, the SAP Innovation and Technology Pavilion, which contains 3 new Challenges they just posted. Our CTO, David Ritter (@dhritter), is at TechEd this week and promises to keep us updated here on the blog, so stay tuned! Also watch our twitter feed for up-to-the minute updates http://twitter.com/innocentive or follow the official InnoCentive twitter feed @innocentive.

If you are an SAP Developer or are reading this blog for the first time today, welcome to the InnoCentive Solver Blog, we’d love to hear from you!

Liz Moise:
I’m joined by Ray Umashankar, Executive Director of the ASSET India Foundation. ASSET India is a non-profit organization that provides computer literacy programs to marginalized children in India so they will have the skills and knowledge needed to escape the sex trade industry in India. ASSET India recently posted a Challenge on InnoCentive seeking the solution of a solar-powered wireless router so they could bring their services to rural parts of India. The Challenge was recently solved by Solver, Zacary Brown. We’ll be putting out the announcement in the next few weeks. Ray, Can you describe the challenges that marginalized Indian children face and how your organization is working to alleviate them?

Ray Umashankar:
Liz, all the new found wealth generated by India’s prominence as a global IT power has not trickled down to the people at the bottom of the pyramid. Life at the bottom of the pyramid has become even more difficult with rising food and fuel costs.

Working with nonprofits to help abused women and children get back on their feet, our daughter Nita was stunned to discover the hopelessness of the children of sex workers. She knew she would see dire poverty in India, but these children seemed to be the most disenfranchised of all: even the poorest of the poor ostracized them. The fear of HIV/AIDS made it worse.

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