Perspectives on Innovation

Corinne Le Buhan was recently selected as the winner of The Economist-Innocentive Human Potential Index Challenge. In addition to the $10,000 award, Corinne was invited to present her solution at The Economist Ideas Economy: Human Potential conference in New York in September 2011. You can view her full solution here, and her presentation here.

How did you hear about InnoCentive and why did you become an InnoCentive Solver?

Curiosity brought me to Innocentive in the first place. As a freelance consultant in intellectual property and innovation management, I wanted to better understand how innovation crowdsourcing works in practice and what new opportunities it enables for my customers. This approach is not very well known yet and is often feared because of the loss of control it seems to imply, but that can be addressed with the right framework and process. So, I registered as a Solver to test it… and ended submitting an ideation Challenge on my own simply because it was inspiring me.

Have you attempted other InnoCentive Challenges?

So far, I have not attempted other Innocentive Challlenges, but I did consider a few. It’s a lot of work to compile a good proposal. You need to gather the relevant part of your background knowledge, you need to devote some time to further explore what other solutions already exist elsewhere and enrich your thinking accordingly, and then you still need to articulate your nascent ideas as clearly as possible to formalize a suitable answer to the Challenge requirements. This process is somewhat similar capturing a technical invention into a good patent description and claims… you need significant quiet time to think and write about it! So I can only work on Challenges when I have enough free time left besides my day-to-day business.

What motivated you to work on the Challenge that you ended up winning?

What particularly motivated me to devote extra-hours building an answer to the Human Potential Index Challenge was its larger purpose and meaning than what I’m usually working on. In my humble view, GDP-based metrics are depressing the whole western economies in a schizophrenic way as we grow GDP at the expense of other goals such as environmental preservation. Still, I personally have the opportunity to interact with a number of creative and positive-minded engineers who have not given up their faith in mankind capability to design new technologies, even if sometimes just for the fun of it. So I thought there must be a way to better capture that, as a human potential index measurement, than with GDP-derived metrics, and that where I started from.

What do you like about working on Challenges?

I like working on almost anything, and Challenges are even more rewarding because it is a creative work. I also like more and more being able to connect and share knowledge from very different fields as my life experience and understanding develops. Challenges like the one I submitted provide a very good opportunity to do so.

What would you like to see happen with your solution?

I now try to integrate my proposal into a larger initiative. I’m using the visibility it gave me to connect to other people with the same concerns and hopes on the need for a better human potential development measurement. I think there’s room for further formalism and prototyping from real data in this area, but this requires funding of some sort. Ideas that are not implemented in the end are just ideas, not innovations… that’s nice, but a bit worthless. I hope we can move to the next step, and have already started to connect to other Challengers to evaluate if there’s enough momentum to further build something concrete out of our respective ideas, expertise and networks.

You can read Corinne’s bio at http://www.ipstudies.ch/about/

Congratulations to Solver Daniel Castro for submitting the winning solution to the  InnoCentive-Economist Healthcare Information Economy Challenge. The Challenge asked for new and exciting ideas for business models that would support or enable a healthcare information economy for the benefit of patients, care givers and manufacturers of healthcare products. Daniel’s solution is below.

Information has the potential to radically transform health care.  Most of the investments that we have been making in health IT have been to improve the efficiency of back-office operations and to improve quality by ensuring that doctors have the right information about the right patient at the right time. But I think when we look at the potential of health IT we will find that these two components only make up a small piece of the pie.  The larger, more transformative, piece will be using IT in health care for knowledge discovery and medical research. But to do this, we need a vibrant health information economy.

My proposal focuses on solving two related problems: 1) how to aggregate and use medical data on an individual level, and 2) how to do this on a national level.

First, at an individual level the problem is that an individual’s medical data is in many places including with different doctors, pharmacies, hospitals and health insurers. We need in health care what Mint.com is for personal finance: a meaningful entity to assemble all of the different data points from different sources. Information-based sectors of the economy often depend on data intermediaries to collect and aggregate data. One way to do this in health care is by using health record data banks (HRDBs). HRDBs are data repositories of a patient’s complete medical history. They are more than a mere personal health record; instead they are the authoritative source of patient health information. In this model, patients or their health insurers would pay a small fee to the HRDB to store, maintain and manage their medical data. HRDBs, in turn, would pay health care providers a transaction fee for every “deposit” of information following a health care encounter. Patients would be free to select the HRDB they believe provides them the best quality and value. HRDBs would compete for customers by developing innovative tools and applications to allow patients to better manage their personal health information. Competition would also help promote high levels of security and privacy, and allow customers who place more value on these items to pay for premium privacy and security controls. HRDBs create the market incentives to allow data aggregation by better aligning the costs and benefits of investing in health IT. (more…)

Earlier this month, The Economist announced a winner in the 21st Century Cyber Schools Challenge.  There were many strong submissions, and the team decided that the two runners up also deserved recognition for their outstanding solutions.  We will be posting solution summaries from the Challenge winner, Andrew Deonarine, as well as the two runners up in this Challenge, Tristram Hewitt and Daniel Rasmus.  Congratulations Andrew, Tristram and Daniel.

Below is Tristram’s summary of his solution:

Imagine a school house in a Nicaraguan village. One hundred students, each with nothing but a laptop, independently engage in their lessons. A precocious twelve year-old collaborates with an Ecuadorian peer on a biology project about rural water contamination over the cyber school learning platform. To her right, an eleven year-old, who tended the family’s coffee plot for the past year, plays a computer game to practice basic addition.

In this cyber school, semi-automated teaching systems power an individualized education. Students learn basic concepts, broken into independent lesson modules, through a mix of multi-media programming, games, interactive assignments, and live teacher contact. Structured peer interactions build creative and critical thinking skills. The teacher’s primary task, then, is not to “stand and deliver” but to facilitate student movement through pre-designed lessons. On the ground level, social workers supervise the school house; encouraging students, engaging parents, and creating the socio-emotional foundation required for academic success.

Grade levels do not exist. Rather, students advance through a course sequence outlined in the primary and secondary school curricula, each of which has a distinct purpose. While primary school teaches the minimum skills and knowledge required for participation in economic and civic life, secondary school prepares students for a vocation or university.

Combined, these elements form a scalable school model. Automated teaching technologies keep costs low by enabling high student-to-teacher ratios. Centrally managed courses improve quality. Local support systems ensure widespread access. Children in the developing world enjoy a newfound opportunity to realize their potential.

With a static kill procedure solution in place on the MC252 well in the Gulf, pressure tests are being performed and results are being reviewed.

Today we’re featuring a solution we received from InnoCentive Solver, Joseph Pegna, which focused on freezing MC252 while it was still blasting oil into the cold waters at the bottom of the Gulf.

The purpose of Pegna’s solution was not to contain the leak from the ocean floor indefinitely, but rather to contain it efficiently until such time as a more permanent plug could be found.

The solution takes advantage of the relatively stable and low temperature of the sea floor to provide a temporary obstruction to the leak by freezing locally available materials: oil and water.

A back-of-the-envelope estimate of leak flow-rates indicates that a few ten’s of cubic meters of liquid Nitrogen would be sufficient to stop the oil in its track. Subsequent freezing of the surrounding water, either by additional liquid N2 or by lowering an industrial refrigeration unit to the ocean floor, would keep an ice plug over the leak.
(more…)

The days and weeks pass, and, until last week, oil continued to blast upwards from the bottom of the Gulf. As time marches on, the pace of new solutions has slowed as well, yet we still continue to receive submissions from you about how to stop the gushing oil and protect the coastline.

With the end of the Gulf Oil Spill Challenge in sight, we wanted to showcase an innovative solution that was submitted by a student from an Advanced Placement (AP) Environmental Sciences class from high school in New Jersey.

What I love about this piece is that it came from the leaders of tomorrow (students), it’s simple, and it focuses on the future (the clean up) even while many people and politicians remain focused on the past (blame) or the present (capping the wellhead). Here is the submission:

“Recently in our AP Environmental class, my teacher came in and told us about the oil spill.

He then told us about your website and began having us work on the clean up crisis of the oil.

All of the students partnered up and started to try out their ideas, if they had any.

I then came up with the idea to use baking soda, which led to some good results, and which ultimately led to an expansion of the idea:

We discovered that baking soda would create tar balls for a long enough period of time that you could place something underneath them, collect them, and drag them out of the water in tact.

So then my friend and I tried placing nylon stocking on the oil to see if it would allow the oil to pass through, and it worked.

Nylon stockings allow the oil to seep through, but they block the clean water.

The result of our tests culminated in our final idea, which actually cleaned up the water to near perfect quality:

• Place the stocking on top of the oil (the oil passes through this porous barrier)
• Sprinkle baking soda on the stocking and the oil
• Wait up to one minute
• Pull the stockings out of the water, which collects the tar balls and leaves the water nearly completely clean

We tested this in class on a large scale and we were able to accomplish getting the water clean.

I hope this idea helps in the crisis and we wish you the best of luck!”