Perspectives on Innovation

RSS feeds are a popular way to let people subscribe to timely updates from their favorite web sites. Instead of having to keep checking the web site to see what’s new, you can sit back on your couch and let your RSS reader application do all the work.

Our “Perspectives on Innovation” blog already has an RSS feed. Now we’ve added feeds for Challenges as well, so you can quickly and easily find out when InnoCentive posts a new Challenge.  Just go to our RSS home page, click on the orange RSS icon next to the Challenge feed that interests you, then follow your web browser’s instructions to subscribe to the feed. You can sign up for feeds that include all open Challenges, or only Challenges in a particular discipline (e.g., Business/Entrepreneurship or Life Sciences), or only Challenges that belong to a particular pavilion (e.g., Clean Tech and Renewable Energy). Each discipline and pavilion page also has an RSS icon that links to the feed for that page.

Take our feeds out for a spin and send us comments, flowers, and brickbats!

Walter Gillett
Director of Research and Development

I’m at the Design Indaba conference in Cape Town, South Africa. What an incredible, creative, inventive group, all focused on thinking creatively about the future!

This really gets me thinking about prize-based innovation as a tool for focusing efforts toward solving not only global challenges, but also for addressing local needs as well. While InnoCentive’s network has already worked on challenges focused on developing areas of the world, the potential to really empower peoples locally is truly inspiring.

As the world gets smaller and smaller, our individual potential to impact others grows exponentially.

Imagine what we could do???!!!

In yesterday’s UK Times Online, Don Tapscott announced a new crowdsourcing initiative aimed at  demonstrating the power of the crowd in solving business challenges.  Corporations in four major industry sectors will each present a multi-faceted challenge that they will be facing over the next few years.  Then they will invite readers, ”The Times’ influential business audience” to collaborate on a strategy to tackle these challenges.

The project starts on March 2nd.  Each month, the site will host a video message from the CEO of one of these companies, outlining their challenge.  A site will be available for collaboration on the project, and presumably the CEOs and other industry experts will observe the progress.  There was no mention of how the best ideas would be compensated – though in this forum, recognition for its own sake could be a compelling motivator.

It’s a great validation of the idea that corporations are going through a massive change in the way they innovate, and the importance of crowdsourcing in that new model.  The question is, will people, presumably people with enough business expertise to tackle the complex problems presented by these corporations, expend the time and energy required to solve these problems, simply for the recognition?  Would you?  It will be very interesting to watch the progress of this initiative, and to see how close the solutions come to the desired outcomes.  Stay tuned!

by Elly Madrigal, Client Operations Manager

 Due to a high demand from Solvers, InnoCentive has launched another form of communication to allow Solvers and Seekers discuss Topics around a specific Challenge.  You may have noticed that there is a new button on the IAVI Challenge, “Functional envelope trimer of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus” (located under the Global Health Pavillion), called “Discuss Challenge”.  Specific Topic areas in this forum include: (1) an Introduction to IAVI, (2) Funding, (3) Collaboration, (4) Prizes, and (5) Confidentiality, plus any other Topics that you may want to discuss.  We invite you to take a look at the forum and add to the discussion if you have any questions or comments around the Challenge and/or the IAVI organization. 

For those of you that have not been involved in a Forum, it is basically a message board for Solvers and Seekers to communicate with each other.  Typically, information is communicated in one direction, through the Challenge posting and Press Releases.  However, with the Challenge Forum, Solvers can now ask questions directly to the Seekers, but with some caveats…..we’ll get into those caveats below.

For those of you that have been involved in a Forum, please no trolling, spamming, flaming, baiting, sock puppeting, double posting, or foul language.  You’ve seen it before.  (more…)

A recent post on VentureBlog called “Innovation Doesn’t Take a Vacation in an Economic Downturn” motivated me to share some of my thoughts on innovation in an uncertain economic climate.

The economic realities of today mean that businesses must deleverage and spend within their means, while continuing to innovate, bringing new products to market, and growing market share. This seeming contradiction of “do more with less” seems impossible in the highly structured monolithic organizations we have built in the past.

Every day, new proof points emerge confirming that “Open” Innovation is game changing: delivering better innovations, faster cycle times, and improved economics. Many forward thinking organizations (e.g. P&G, as profiled recently in Mechanical Engineering Magazine) actually embraced “Open” in the good times and have created sustainable competitive advantage for themselves, impacting both top and bottom line results. These organizations moved cultural and political mountains, throwing out the destructive NIH thinking of the past. For these businesses, “Open” Innovation will pay enormous dividends in these difficult economic times.

What about all the other organizations that must now think differently in order to survive? They continue to cling to dated ideas that they must invent, control, and own every aspect of their existence. They have erected legal, cultural, and political roadblocks to engaging the rest of the world in their businesses and are now paying the price. They desperately need “Open” Innovation, but will react to this economic crisis by “hunkering down” and will miss the opportunity to really change.

Therein lies the conundrum: they must learn to be “Open” at precisely the same time their businesses have the least will to think differently. Here is my message for these organizations: This is not the worst time, this is BEST imaginable time for change. Companies should be driving “Open” in all its forms (customer, markets, partners, crowdsourcing) with urgency and conviction. ORGANIZATIONS DO NOT CHANGE UNTIL THEY HAVE TO CHANGE. We are faced with unparalleled opportunity and need to rethink and reengineer the fundamentals of our businesses. The smart approach is to use this crisis as the call to arms and to drive real institutional change. Businesses that act now will emerge stronger in more ways than one. A CRISIS IS A TERRIBLE THING TO WASTE … make this crisis count.