Perspectives on Innovation

Today marks the first in a series of blog posts written by the InnoCentive Client Services team.   As the primary interface to both the Seeker and Solver communities, Client Services is in a unique position to understand what it takes to successfully write and solve an InnoCentive Challenge.  We hope that these posts will be useful to you - and as always we welcome your questions, suggestions and feedback!

The InnoCentive Client Services Team - Who We Are

By Gabriel Eichler
InnoCentive Client Services

For many Solvers, the Client Services team is the virtual face of InnoCentive. We are involved in every aspect of the Challenge lifecycle, from working to define the crux of the problem with Seekers, to answering the questions of inquisitive Solvers and then making that exciting introduction between the winning Solver and appreciative Seeker. With such a wide variety of responsibilities, the InnoCentive Client Services team wears several hats, but that comes naturally to us.

We’re an experienced and diverse bunch. We have a combined total of over 17 years of Open Innovation experience and an average 13 years of R&D intensive industry experience. We have advanced degrees in Chemistry, Biology, Computational Sciences, Engineering and Business. The Client Services team has worked all over the world including Russia, Switzerland, France, Israel, Thailand, Japan, Germany, and even Alaska. On top of that, we collectively speak 7 different languages.

Even considering this diversity, we’ve joined InnoCentive because we believe in the promise of Open Innovation. We not only love to provide exciting Challenges for individuals around the globe but we also believe that the opening of innovation will lead to more and better innovation for all. It is precisely because of this passion that we’re launching this new series of blog entries by the InnoCentive Client Services team. We hope that through the next several months, you’ll get to know us better and our individual passions for Open Innovation will shine through. More importantly, we hope that you can benefit from the insights we share. We have after all seen over 700 Challenges on the InnoCentive Website, so we happen to know a thing or two about what it takes to get the most out of our marketplace. We encourage you to leave comments, ask questions and reach out to any of us if you’d like to join the conversation. Enjoy.

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.

I recently received this piece from Gabriel Eichler, one of our Client Services team members, and I wanted to share it with you all. He goes into detail on the important role that InnoCentive plays as a broker between the Seeker and you the Solver:

As most of our clients and members of our community already know, InnoCentive plays an important role in brokering Open Innovation interactions between Seeker organizations and you, our network of talented Solvers. Brokering such transactions is difficult since InnoCentive serves as a two-way firewall between the Seeker organization and Solver by keeping all parties anonymous throughout the process while simultaneously ensuring the integrity of the interaction. It occurred to me, however, that since most individuals interact with InnoCentive as either a Seeker or a Solver (and rarely both), they are unfamiliar with the actions undertaken by InnoCentive’s Client Services Team on behalf of both parties. To improve the understanding of both our Seekers and Solvers, I’ve dedicated this blog entry to a brief discussion on how InnoCentive’s Client Services Team supports these innovation interactions.

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We posted our own crowdsourcing Challenge in November asking our Solver community to develop 30-90 second marketing videos to promote InnoCentive and the benefits of being a Solver. The response was great - we had over 450 Project Rooms on this one Challenge. All the submissions were really good, and narrowing it down to the final seven was tough, but we did that in March and asked the Solver community to vote on their favorite. We here at InnoCentive also voted for our favorite. The two winning Solvers each will receive $5000.

Check them out - both great and with very different approaches. I posted the 2 winners below and in future posts I’ll add more from our finalists, because they are all really good. I was really impressed with the range of creativity and talent - clearly demonstrating that our open innovation community has skills that run deep and wide.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the 2008 Challenge.

Watch, enjoy and comment below to let us know what you think.

Meg

Voted #1 by the Solver Community:

Voted #1 by InnoCentive Employees:

Last week was quite a travel adventure for me as I winded across the US and had meetings with innovation leaders from all over the world.We started out in Los Angeles attending the Milken Institute Global Conference. Thought leaders from around the globe gathered to discuss the most pressing issues of the day as well as the newest in business and technical innovations. Present among the crowd were Sumner Redstone, Bill Bennett, Governor Schwarzenegger, Maria Bartiromo, Michael Milken and many others. At the conference we had the opportunity to participate in a couple of panel sessions focused on building WE rather than ME organizations.

InnoCentive’s Board Member Barry Libert and his company, mZinga were our gracious hosts at the event, and their platform for workplace and customer community development combined with InnoCentive for a great story. Open innovation was a hot topic all across the conference and the turnout for you panel was so great people were turned away at the door due to room capacity constraints! In one session we used the SunNight Solar Challenges as an example of Open Innovation and we gave out a few dozen of the now famous orange BOGO flashlights. It was fascinating to see the response of the audience when we talked about our Solver community and the creative solutions they bring to the table. I had the pleasure to describe some of our great Solvers and weave success stories like the Oil Spill Recovery Challenge, Rockefeller Challenges in front of world business leaders.  

After Milken, we headed over to New York and DC for meetings with two very large potential Seeker Clients.   Both of these organizations could be considered “old economy” type organizations that on the surface don’t seem very “innovative” - let alone innovating “openly.” Much to our surprise, our prize based innovation business model is becoming quite acceptable even in these organizations that historically have had a “not invented here” mentality.

One of the interesting sub topics that continues to be debated among larger organizations is the amount of “cloaking” around the identity of the Seeker and the purpose of the challenge. If you are going to leverage Open Innovation, then the question always becomes; “What are the risks of being open versus the rewards of diversified thought?” The risks people are concerned about are exposure of their identity, problems they can’t solve which may expose weakness and the disclosure of the product development pipeline. These are all very valid risks to be sure.  Of course the other side of the argument is value of getting solutions from the CROWD is invaluable and often produces results never before achieved internally.  As you can imagine the attitudes on this topic run as wide as Pacific Ocean.   

One advocate of “lower cloaking” came up with a great line.  It goes like this:  “Abject paranoia and open innovation are mutually exclusive.”

For you open innovation advocates on this blog, go ahead and use that line royalty free!

Tom