Perspectives on Innovation

We recently announced that a Challenge seeking the design of an affordable solar-powered device to prevent or limit the spread of malaria had been solved.  The Challenge was posted by Mark Bent, CEO of SunNight Solar.  Mark has been in the InnoCentive spotlight before, having previously posted a Challenge to create a solar powered light source for people living in off-grid areas of the world.

Mark’s interest in eradicating malaria comes from his own personal experience, and from his ongoing desire to help the world’s most vulnerable populations.  I asked Mark to provide some thoughts on the background of this Challenge, which he has kindly done in the post below.  Next week we’ll hear from the Solver of this Challenge, Tom Kruer.

Innocentive and SunNight Solar have recently announced the results of our latest cooperative effort – development of a device to trap and kill the mosquito which is the vector for malaria. With 300-500 million cases of malaria each year, resulting in immense societal and economic costs, over a million deaths and a child in Africa dying every 30 seconds from this disease, this is an effort SunNight Solar is very pleased to push forward to the product testing and commercialization stage. Our thanks to Innocentive, as well as funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, which has made this all possible.

I also wanted to offer some insights and developments which surprised me, and once again, showed another value proposition in participating in the Innocentive platform and this unique development cycle. I lived in Africa for over two decades and have contracted malaria twice, so I have some idea of the impact this malady has on the human body. I have also had friends die and I have seen the full hospital wards, so I have some first hand knowledge of malaria. Regrettably, with global warming, the range of mosquito infestation will no doubt grow and more people will be impacted by this disease in the future, so finding new ways to attack this age old problem is essential. (more…)

By now, most InnoCentive Solvers know about Mark Bent, CEO of SunNight Solar, the company that is bringing light to people in off-grid areas of the world.  Over the last few months we’ve blogged about Mark frequently, and about the good work he’s doing in Africa and beyond.  In a phone call today about another project Mark has been working on (more on that soon), he let me know that the BOGO flashlight, created with the help of an InnoCentive Solver, will now be distributed to families living without power in the Gaza strip, through a program called Lights for Gaza.  The project was brought to Mark by students in Mexico, Egypt, India and Bethlehem, who are part of Engineers Without Borders.  This rapidly expanding grass roots effort aims to push back the darkness, after the destruction of much of Gaza electrical distribution infrastructure during the recent 22 days of fighting.  With the majority of the 1.3 million inhabitants of Gaza fearfully waiting out the nights without light, or forced to use candles or makeshift kerosene lanterns for illumination, lighting is often overlooked as a vital part in alleviating humanitarian suffering and allowing families to regain a minimal quality of life.

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Recently InnoCentive posted a Challenge asking Solvers to develop a 30-90 second marketing video to promote InnoCentive and the benefits of being a Seeker. This was a project that grew out of the success of our 2008 video Challenge, where we requested a video highlighting the benefits of being a Solver.

In the Challenge, we asked Solvers to promote, in a persuasive, innovative and fun way, the benefits of being an active InnoCentive Seeker, including the following themes:

Faster time to market for products
Bigger breakthroughs
Lower R&D cost
Access to world class talent
Becoming an Open Innovation Champion
The added value of InnoCentive’s expert support team at every step of the open innovation process.

The response was amazing – we had almost 400 Project Rooms opened for this Challenge. We had many outstanding submissions, and narrowing them down was tough, but we have selected the top five and posted them on the InnoCentive YouTube Channel.  Now we’d like to hear from you.  Go to the InnoCentive YouTube Channel to vote on the video you think is the best, using the YouTube rating system.  We will also hold a vote within InnoCentive to determine which video we think best answers the Challenge criteria.  The two winning Solvers will each receive an award.

Enjoy!

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…)

InnoCentive recently announced the posting of one of the most ambitious Challenges we’ve seen to date – posted by the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI). The objective of this Challenge is to further the development of an HIV/AIDS vaccine.  I asked Kalpana Gupta, Ph.D., Director, New Alliances & Initiatives at IAVI to provide a bit of insight into the current state of HIV/AIDS vaccine development and the importance of this particular Challenge to that effort. 
 

Hi Kalpana – thanks for answering my questions today.  Can you tell me about the general state of the search for a vaccine for HIV/AIDS?

Hi Connie.  Although HIV was discovered to be the virus that causes AIDS 25 years ago, the effort to develop a preventive AIDS vaccine has only been a robustly funded initiative in the last decade. In that time, we have seen a tremendous surge in political and financial support for AIDS vaccine development. We have also seen a steady stream of incremental advances that provide the foundation for the AIDS vaccine development efforts now underway across the globe.  (more…)