Today’s guest post is provided by InnoCentive Top Solver Harvey Arbesman, and his wife Marian Arbesman.  Harvey won the Discovery Prize and the Thought Prize in the Prize4Life ALS Challenge. Harvey and Marian are innovation consultants who in 2002 founded ArbesIdeas, Inc., a research and consulting company devoted to innovation in the life sciences.  They’ll be contributing to this blog from time to time as part of our “Help a Solver Succeed” series.  Harvey and Marian’s previous post, A Systematic Approach to Defining the Challenge for a Winning Solution, can be found here.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

Albert Einstein

Maps are amazing – whether one is taking a trip or trying to locate a specific store in the mall, maps can help you find out where you are, and the best way to get where you are trying to go. In addition, by stepping back from the details of the map, you can understand the big picture of the journey you are taking.

Mapping is also very useful during the process of understanding a Challenge that you are trying to solve. Plotting the relationships among various factors involved in a Challenge can help establish clarity regarding the problem. It also stretches one’s thinking and promotes the development of new thought patterns and connections between established areas.

One mapping concept that is helpful to use at this stage is the Epidemiologic Triad; that the interaction of the agent, host, and environment determines whether any given disease will occur. The underlying assumption of the Epidemiologic Triad is that there is rarely one thing that solely determines if someone will develop a disease. The corollary of this assumption for us Solvers is that we must always remember that there is rarely only one way to solve a Challenge. Looking at the various components that may be playing a role in the problem comprising any Challenge is a key factor in approaching how to solve the Challenge. The classic Epidemiologic Triad has long been used to more fully understand why a given disease develops. In addition to the life sciences, this epidemiologic approach is very helpful for many types of Challenges, including those in business, engineering and design, the physical sciences and the social sciences. When a Solver is first approaching a new Challenge, using the Epidemiologic Triad to systematically review the problem and map what is known about the problem under study helps the Solver get a better sense of where they are in the Challenge. This prepares the Solver to then explore variations of what is already known and to begin to discover completely new areas not on the current map.

So, for this discussion, think, “Challenge” whenever one sees “disease” and you will be on your way to submitting more winning solutions. The first part of the Epidemiologic Triad is the agent, which can be any biological, physical, or chemical entity associated with a disease. The host’s susceptibility to an agent is based on a variety of factors including personal characteristics such as age and sex, genetic predisposition, and personal behaviors engaged in by the host that may predispose the person to a given disease. The third component of the Epidemiologic Triad is the environment which includes those conditions that are not related to either the host or the agent, but do affect their interaction. Social, economic, and climatologic factors can be important in determining whether or not a disease develops.

For example, if one were trying to solve the Challenge of reducing motor vehicle accidents in a specific community, first mapping the different components that may be contributing to the problem would help one see where solutions may possibly be found. In this case, one could view the motor vehicle accident as the “disease.” The agent could be the car and different aspects of the car could include various safety features such as tire pressure and antilock brakes. The host is the driver, and different characteristics of the host could include age, driving history and sobriety of the driver. The environment could include road or weather conditions which could still have a strong influence on whether or not a motor vehicle accident will take place even if the car (agent) has great safety features and is being driven by someone (host) with a long history of driving and is sober.

To help the Solver in creating these maps, a variety of mind mapping tools are available, either as stand-alone programs or web-based applications. A list of mind mapping software, both free and proprietary can be found here.

In summary, applying the Epidemiologic Triad to more visually and systematically map a Challenge is a great way to develop more winning solutions. Try it out on your next attempt to solve a Challenge and see how new ideas and solutions can more effortlessly flow from the process. Good luck and have fun changing the world!

Harvey Arbesman, MD, MS
Marian Arbesman, PhD, OTR/R

On this topic, I’ve come to what I believe is a deep insight:

Well constructed “Challenges” are an astonishingly powerful and uniquely effective tool for focusing the energies of people everywhere on the multitude of important problems in the world .

Let me explain how I came to that recognition.

The realization begins a few years ago with Professor Karim Lakhani from Harvard Business School and his study of InnoCentive titled “The Value of Openness in Scientific Problem Solving”.  Karim’s research resulted in two brilliant insights: 1) the diversity of InnoCentive’s distributed network is in fact its inherent strength for problem solving; and 2) Solvers participate for the following reasons:  to solve problems that matter, to be part of a community (and to be recognized within the community when they are successful), and for the prize itself.  This last point also speaks to my fundamental  belief that humans by their very nature need to problem solve, to break new ground, to climb Mount Everest.

Subsequent works from Karim and others have consistently confirmed the critical importance of the problem definition in InnoCentive’s Challenge based model and its success.  The problems must invite very diverse participation (you want entrepreneurs, mechanics, and chemists working on engineering problems, not just engineers) while focusing the Solver on the specific task at hand with as much context as possible (how do you explain an engineering problem to non engineers?).  As you can imagine, getting this right is incredibly important to sustaining high solution rates.

In 2008, I met Paul Carlile, a professor from Boston University with an unusual background in social and computer science and a gift for seeing the world through a systems lens.  Paul introduced me to the concept of Boundary Objects which sociologists use to describe powerful compartments of information which are both well defined and which translate naturally across communities and cultures.  We immediately realized that InnoCentive Challenges are Boundary Objects in every sense of the term.  Challenges articulate the need, describe the problem, specify success criteria, and establish the inducements.  This last point is critically important because the inducement telegraphs a (non zero) value to the world.  The best Challenges are universal and understood universally.

Now it is important to note that we believe it is the precision and care we take to define the Challenges that elevate them to the status of true Boundary Objects.  Our hallmark in this process is the understanding of how to manage the process to truly engage a highly distributed network and focus them to drive successful outcomes.  Well defined Challenges must ask the right questions (we strive for “pre inventive form” for you academics!).  We apply a meticulous attention to detail around understanding and articulating problems in concise ways.  Identifying the supporting information to give every Solver what they need to compete or team successfully.  Good Challenge design anticipates the audience and the conditions for effective engagement: Is the need for ideas, business plans, scientific or technological advancement?  Do I want the world to give me the idea or do I want them to demonstrate something physical?  Challenges must anticipate the cultural and legal realities of the world (e.g., is intellectual property an issue?).  What is the inducement to the network?  For a simple idea, a small reward may be sufficient, while a technological innovation may require a team to spend months of time and capital to develop a winning solution, requiring a substantial prize.  All of these things must be assembled into a Challenge before it is exposed to the world of problem solvers.

We have learned at InnoCentive that for the really big problems, it is essential to take a highly disciplined approach and to systematically refine the problems into more focused questions and ultimately to well defined Challenges .  For example, the big problem is not the need for a new drug for a neglected disease, it is the elimination and/or minimization of the human suffering caused by the disease.  The right questions might include: How do we limit transmission?  How can we cost effectively produce treatments that comprehend market based economics to ensure a sustainable model?  How do we distribute treatments in the developing world?  Even these questions require further decomposition until we get to well formulated challenges (E.g., Can we get 5X more vaccine into the hands of those that need it in the context of real world economic, cultural, and political constraints in Sub-Saharan Africa?).  The point is that focusing the energy of a human population on these crucial issues has always been possible, but requires process and tools to do so effectively.   Disciplined construction of the “Challenges” focus that human energy to drive results in ways never before possible.

The latest realization for me was attending the MIT Distributed Leadership Forum last week.  Put together by Professor Deborah Ancona (author of X Teams) of MIT, the Forum explored a number of important questions:  How do we empower leaders everywhere in organizations?  What are the implications of new organizational structures as we see destruction of the old established paradigms?  What tools can enable distributed leadership and work?  Presentations ran the gamut, from Alph Bingham, InnoCentive’s Founder, making vivid the need for organizations to think differently, to organizers of the Obama campaign team describing how they engaged millions in the campaign to win the oval office (a well defined challenge!), to Jim Parker, ex CEO of Southwest Airlines, describing how shared mission, passion, and empowerment built a world class airline and a truly winning culture.  Remember President Kennedy in the 60’s challenging a country to put a man on the moon in ten years?  I listened to example after example of exceedingly well defined goals and innovative empowerment structures enabling stunning outcomes inside and outside of traditional organizational paradigms.  One message was clear, empowering and enabling new forms of work and leadership may be crucial to solving many of the challenges facing our society today and while those forms are quickly evolving, the tools for organizing and distributing the effort are  just beginning to be understood.

So with thanks to many brilliant people along the way, it all came together for me.  There is an Art and Science to “Challenges” which allow them to effectively harness the wealth of human creatively and inventiveness.  This Art and Science is not only key to understanding InnoCentive’s success, it is crucial to enabling the kinds of distributed world changing problem solving we need to see in this century.

Whether it is the quest to eliminate suffering from a neglected disease, or accelerating research for sustainable energy sources, or putting a man on the moon, it is clear that Challenges have a powerful role to play in changing the world.  This is the promise of Crowdsourcing and the “Challenge” is the precision instrument that enables its full potential.

I invite your feedback and thoughts.  In fact, consider it a Challenge!

Dwayne Spradlin
CEO, InnoCentive