Perspectives on Innovation

InnoCentive Founder Alph Bingham will be speaking at X-Prize’s i2i Conference in New York next month, along with InnoCentive CEO Dwayne Spradlin.  Alph was invited to guest author a blog post for the conference,  on the topic of his presentation – incentivized competition.  Below is the text of his post.

The use of prize incentives to motivate problem solving is well established. While some debate continues vis-a-vis effectiveness, especially in contrast to more traditional modes of research and discovery, most of that analysis has been from the ‘receiving’ end of the spectrum, that is, by the proposed ‘users’ of the innovation. Less so has ‘effectiveness’ been addressed from the inventor’s or contributor’s perspective.

Perhaps it seems all too obvious. The solvers of such puzzles as the Longitude Problem or a Millennium Problem must surely be motivated to work in exchange for the substantial cash reward; it’s no more complicated than any employment contract. Of course, people do things for lots of reasons. I think, over time, that prize systems have evolved to meet specific NON-CASH interests of the solvers and it would be interesting to see how two systems have developed, characterized by InnoCentive on the one hand and the X-Prize on the other. (more…)

I’m at the Design Indaba conference in Cape Town, South Africa. What an incredible, creative, inventive group, all focused on thinking creatively about the future!

This really gets me thinking about prize-based innovation as a tool for focusing efforts toward solving not only global challenges, but also for addressing local needs as well. While InnoCentive’s network has already worked on challenges focused on developing areas of the world, the potential to really empower peoples locally is truly inspiring.

As the world gets smaller and smaller, our individual potential to impact others grows exponentially.

Imagine what we could do???!!!

In recent discussion titled “Prize-based innovation for the public good” on the Open Innovation discussion group on LinkedIn, a thoughtful comment by Chris Townsend (@chris_townsend_) from Forrester Research prompted me to do some thinking about how far prize-based innovation has come, and in a relatively short timeframe.  The question was whether prize-based innovation was appropriate for broad-based “business critical” challenges, or was only applicable for narrowly focused, more discrete individual problems.  I’d like to share some of my thoughts on this topic, also posted within the discussion forum.

Incentives are the single most powerful tool we have to drive behavior and align efforts toward common purpose as a society, economy, and as discrete organizations.  Prize-based innovation in its simplest form simply packages the need, clearly states the goal, and makes clear the incentive.  However, prize based innovation is evolving quickly and has become a rich field in recent years.

Among the most interesting developments is that concrete notions of prize-based innovation are developing for new classes of problem solving.  Some of the most interesting work we are doing right now concerns the notion that complex, multidisciplinary, highly coupled,  and/or inherently non-specific (ambiguous in terms of solution criteria) problems may be broken down into multiple units (or Challenges) and run in series or in parallel.

For example, InnoCentive will routinely run “Ideation” Challenges for organizations to get the novel ideas, who then run a “Theoretical” challenge to develop the most interesting ideas into specific approaches (generally solved by different Solvers).  They may then post “Reduction to Practice” Challenges to develop prototypes or to demonstrate viability and finally, organizations without in-house development capacity may run electronic Requests for Proposals to identify development or manufacturing partners.  Each of these may require different prize-based designs and need to take into account the stage in the innovation process, audience, type, complexity, and volume of work needed, etc.  Some organizations will start in the middle and some will do end to end with InnoCentive. (more…)