Perspectives on Innovation

In today’s InnoCentive Insider, Peter Lohse talks about the curious fact that many Challenges are awarded to Solvers with expertise outside of the Challenge field.

It has been more than six years since I joined InnoCentive and I continue to be fascinated by the business model and the success we have with delivering solutions to our Clients. Our success rate overall was around 30% at the end of 2005 and is now quickly approaching the 50% mark (on average, for Theoretical and RTP Challenges). We do not have an empirical basis yet for comparing this outcome with the effectiveness of internally focused solution efforts. However, considering that many of the Seekers had been unsuccessful in finding a solution to these problems on their own, I would say the solution rate is quite spectacular.

Much of the praise for this success goes to our Solvers. They are the brains, experimenters and composers behind the winning proposals. The Client Services Team at InnoCentive is in the privileged position to be a first hand witness to our Solvers’ tremendous creativity.  Each of us has seen hundreds of successful submissions, hence we have a pretty good understanding of how a proposal should be formulated to have the potential for winning an award. These learnings are available to all of our Solvers through the InnoCentive newsletter or through this Blog. For example recent postings from my colleagues Lisa Reinhold, Eugene Ivanov and Michael Albarelli provide valuable insights in this regard.  While we believe that Solvers who follow these guidelines will submit proposals which are more likely to be successful, we recognize that factors other than the form of a Solver submission will have an influence on winning an award. It’s some these other factors that I would like to discuss. (more…)

Liz Moise:
I’m joined by Dr. Karim R. Lakhani, Professor at Harvard Business School. Dr. Lakhani, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. You’ve watched InnoCentive grow for quite a few years now. I’m sure our Solvers may be familiar with your research study, published a few years back. Could you tell me in a few sentences, what your conclusions were on InnoCentive, in that study?

Dr. Karim Lakhani:
I worked with Lars Bo Jeppesen from the Copenhagen Business School along with InnoCentive staff to understand the effectiveness of the problem solving process at InnoCentive.

Most problem solving involves effort by the problem holder to search for the relevant knowledge that will help create an effective and workable solution. However, many studies have shown that this search for knowledge is quite “local,” i.e. problem holders only access knowledge that they are familiar with and rarely do they go outside of their fixed views of the problem or personal knowledge bases. With InnoCentive – the problem holder is actually doing a “broadcast search,” i.e. they broadcast their solution requirements to the whole world – with the hopes of finding someone that has the relevant knowledge that can help create the solution. The problem holder goes from being a problem Solver to a solution seeker.

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