Perspectives on Innovation

What’s your favorite open InnoCentive Challenge?  Tweet about it as part of  Challenge Tuesday.  Not only will you be helping to spread the word about a great Challenge, you’ll be entered to win a prize.

Here’s how it works:

Every Tuesday, Tweet a link to your favorite open InnoCentive Challenge using the hashtag #challengetuesday and the Twitter handle @innocentive.  An example is below:

My favorite Challenge from @innocentive:  The Cathode Ray Tube Challenge: New Uses for Recycled Glass http://bit.ly/tx9kvg #challengetuesday

One Twitterer will be randomly selected each Tuesday to receive a prize from InnoCentive. Prize examples include iTunes cards, Amazon gift cards or gift certificates to Global Giving. Each Tuesday we’ll announce that week’s prize, and at the end of the day we’ll announce the winner.

We’re looking forward to seeing what Challenges get the most buzz – help us spread the word!

Last week our CEO Dwayne Spradlin issued a challenge on Twitter (he’s InnoCentiveCEO) asking everyone for their “best ever innovation one liners/quotes.” So today, I thought I’d ask all our blog friends for their “real world pearls of wisdom” on innovation.

Tell us in the comments!

Here’s a crowdsourcing project to interest the burgeoning writer in you – in October 2009 BBC America Audiobooks gave people the chance to write a story with famed urban fantasy writer Neil Gaiman via the most contemporary of social media art forms, Twitter.  Gaiman provided the first line of the story (”Sam was brushing her hair when the girl in the mirror put down the hairbrush, smiled & said, ‘We don’t love you anymore.’”) and has invited dozens of twitterphiles to continue the story in 140 character increments. The story-thon went on for 8 days and is now complete and published on BBCAA’s blog (http://bit.ly/GmN5L). The audiobook, to be read by Gaiman, will be titled and published shortly.

The process was as follows: anyone could Tweet the next sentence, but a BBCAA editor was charged with sifting and selecting sentences to make a cohesive storyline, and came up with the finished product. Surprisingly, even though Neil Gaiman had very little to do with the actual arc of the storyline, the character development or the ending, the final selection is very Gaimanesque in tone. Must be due to the number of Gaiman fans that contributed!

What do you think? Collaboration is not a new concept in the writing world – the shared universe of Dragonlance is one such example. However, with collaboration being the highway of the internet, there are a bunch of pretty cool online creative collaborations taking place such as such as Altered Books (http://bit.ly/w9jxb) and ArsPoetics (http://bit.ly/3b9nOd).

Read the story here (http://bit.ly/GmN5L) & let us know your thoughts on crowdsourcing the creative arts.

Happy New Year!  In a blog post last month, we highlighted some of our joint successes in 2008.   Now we’d like to tell you about our ideas for 2009.

In 2009, we’d like to get to know you better.  And we’d like to give you a way to get to know us better.  We already know that the InnoCentive Solver community is one of great passion and creativity.  We know that you are dedicated to solving the big problems and tackling interesting puzzles.   Above all, we know that you are always looking for ways to share what you know and learn more about things that interest you.  And we believe that great things can happen when great minds get together and share ideas.

So in 2009, the key word is COMMUNICATION.  Between you and InnoCentive, with each other.  As the first phase of this initiative, we’d like to introduce the following ways for you to join the conversation (please note:  specific Challenges should only be discussed in the Challenge project room on InnoCentive.com):

Become a fan of InnoCentive on Facebook. This  is where you can start discussions with us and with other Solvers, post videos, find out about upcoming events and meetups and read the latest news about InnoCentive.

Follow us on Twitter!

Join the Open Innovation discussion group on LinkedIn. This is a group that discusses any and all views on innovation – content is not specifically related to InnoCentive.

InnoCentive Insider Blog Series. Launched in early 2007, the InnoCentive blog has been a vehicle for us to communicate with you, and for you to provide feedback.  One lesson we learned last year was that you are interested in information that helps you become more effective in writing and submitting Challenges.  This led us to launch the Client Services InnoCentive Insider blog series.  The most recent post, The Lifecycle of a Challenge – Behind the Scenes, provides some insight into what happens both before and after you submit your solution to an InnoCentive Challenge.  We’re still listening – is there anything else you’d like to see here?

Later this year, you’ll see changes to our web site which further reflect our goal to engage you in conversation.  In the meantime, please let us know what you think – are we on the right track?