Perspectives on Innovation

I recently interviewed Scott Pegau, Director of the Oil Spill Recover Institute (OSRI) in Cordova Alaska. OSRI was created by the government in response to the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and has been tasked with improving oil spill response in Arctic and subarctic marine waters. As you may know, OSRI has posted several Challenges on the InnoCentive website, including the Challenge, recently made famous by the New York Times, to separate oil from water in recovery barges. That Challenge was solved by John Davis, an oil-industry outsider. We find that many of the best solutions on our network come from outside the industry in which they are posted.

Liz Moise:
Scott, tell me – how long had you been working on this particular Challenge before coming to InnoCentive, and what other avenues did you pursue before coming to us for help with this problem?

Scott Pegau:
Actually, the process of setting up a prize program predates my arrival at OSRI.  The idea had been kicked around for a couple years, but hadn’t fully developed because of the need to ensure the program was properly run and advertised.  Once InnoCentive was identified as a mechanism to post and manage challenges we started to actually draft the concepts that have become the challenges we have released.

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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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The New York Times today published a great piece on InnoCentive, featuring our own John Davis, among others. If You Have a Problem, Ask Everyone. This is a great sign that Open Innovation is really starting to catch on with the mainstream audience. What a great testament to the brilliance of our Solver network.