Perspectives on Innovation

Greetings, InnoCentive Solvers—

Quick note to inform you that we’ve posted two new Emergency Response 2.0 Challenges around the Gulf Oil Spill disaster: Emergency Response 2.0: Oil Detection on Ocean Surfaces; and Emergency Response 2.0: Oil Collection in Gulf of Mexico.

Innovative solutions to these Challenges will help the organizers and crews clean the water and beaches in the short and medium terms.

For the Oil Detection on Ocean Surfaces Challenge we’re looking for new ways to improve the conventional imaging processes that are currently being deployed, i.e., satellite radar, visual, LIDAR, etc. We are also looking for ways to improve aerial tools aboard helicopters and aircrafts, and, to a lesser degree, surface spotting techniques.

For the Oil Collection in the Gulf of Mexico Challenge we’re looking for commercially available equipment, technology and ideas that would enable the rapid conversion of commercial vessels (e.g., fishing) into oil recovery units.

On the back-end, a board of advisers, currently being assembled, will review the submissions from both Challenges.

That said we also want to take advantage of the perspectives, skills, and talents in the InnoCentive network. In order to accomplish that, we have activated the discussion board within the project rooms.

Please take a look as soon as you can.

Best,

JD

Congratulations to Thomas Stowe from Texas, for winning the InnoCentive “Send A Solver – Part 2 Contest.” Thomas  is one of the winning Solvers for the Challenge “High Refractive Index Polycarbonate”, and he is also the winner of InnoCentive’s first “Send A Solver” contest.

On behalf of InnoCentive, thank you everyone for participating in the Send A Solver – Part 2 Contest.

Manal Khan

I have some exciting news to share with you today.  As a result of all your feedback last year, we have multiple website updates planned this year.  The first update is now live and appears in the “My InnoCentive” area of the website.  For Solvers, this is the section of the website you see once you’ve logged in.  We focused on 5 key changes that we hope will make the website easier to use and more informative: (more…)

Veteran Solvers and new Solvers alike have told us that they enjoy looking through the new Challenges each week. So tell us – what is your favorite Challenge? Which one was the toughest, or the hardest to ignore? Was there one that made you laugh, or peaked your interest? Tell us!

In an excellent posting titled “Building a better collective memory”, Michael Nielsen makes the point that science currently lacks the ‘trust infrastructure’ and incentives necessary for free, unrestricted trading of questions and ideas. Imagine two scientists; each has information that could benefit the other more than it benefits themselves. In an ideal world, they’d exchange this information, and both would be better off. This is the concept of ‘comparative advantage’. Unfortunately, in the real world these scientists:

-Will probably never meet in the first place
-If they should happen to meet, they won’t likely talk about the relevant gaps in their work
-Even if they discuss their needs, they don’t have any basis on which to trust each other enough to engage in collaboration

Michael envisions an ideal “collaboration market” that will enable the open (or at least productive) exchange of ideas. This engendered lots of interesting debate, mostly about why none of the existing collaboration sites, publication archives, and the like are NOT fostering this type of exchange. Since we’ve been thinking about this problem for some time at InnoCentive, I thought I’d share some perspective on what characteristics we believe a collaboration platform needs to be effective.

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