Perspectives on Innovation

How can you tell when crowdsourcing has hit the mainstream?  When it’s featured on one of TV’s hottest shows.

“House, M.D.” is about a doctor whose specialty is diagnosing unusual diseases.  Each week’s episode features a patient presenting with unexplainable symptoms who requires tests and treatments until the diagnostic team finds the real disease. This week’s episode followed this pattern, but with one exception.

Cue up crowdsourcing.

The episode begins in the traditional style where a patient, a young, technologically “plugged-in” virtual video game creator, is admitted with a bizarre ailment. Unfortunately for him, the famous diagnostician he’s Googled (Dr. House) has quit his job and it’s up to House’s team to solve the mystery, led by his colleague, Dr. Foreman.

When the patient doesn’t think he’s being treated quickly enough, he turns to crowdsourcing for his cure, offering $25,000 for anyone online who can correctly diagnose him. Through a series of events, Dr. Foreman thinks the patient needs chemotherapy, but a team member decides it wouldn’t hurt to check the ideas submitted online before starting the patient on chemo.  In the end, the crowdsourced idea was the correct one and the patient’s disease is correctly treated. The irony is that it was Dr. House who posted the correct diagnosis and received the $25,000 check.

This is the first in our Blog Series “Help a Solver Succeed” (HASS), where we ask InnoCentive experts to provide resources that they think might be helpful to you in solving Challenges.  Today’s post is from Innovation Development Manager Gabriel Eichler, who is a member of our Client Services team.

Our blogging team has asked me to write a piece for the first issue of the “HASS – Help A Solver Succeed” blog series. This section is dedicated to profiling enabling technologies, services or information that may help our Solvers be more successful at either Solving our problems or be more productive at doing your own work on a daily basis.

Since my educational background and Challenge writing specialty is almost exclusively focused on computational, bioinformatic or statistical Challenges I find it apt to write about a programming language.  I have decided to dedicate my HASS entry to the programming language R.

I came to know R during my PhD research at the US National Cancer Institute.  Previously I had written extensive amounts of code in Matlab – my previous programming language of choice for rapid prototyping or computational experimentation. Though Matlab has a more sophisticated look and feel, and I knew it quite well, I was instructed that learning R would be essential to my graduate studies. Digging in I learned that R was first distributed in the spring of 1997 by Robert Gentlemen and Ross Ihaka and it resembles the closed source, commercial language S in many ways.  However, from the beginning Gentelmen and Ihaka have made R an open source language that thrives off a community of volunteer developers. From nearly the very beginning, R has maintained the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) resource for everyone to publish their own R extensions or libraries. This brilliant step quickly made R a force to be reckoned with.

I find R to be the best way to quickly model statistical questions, create powerful graphs or even super compute a difficult but parallelizable problem. The interface and kernel are extremely lightweight so your computer is left with maximal resources to compute on what you want.  Beyond that, the CRAN resources make R an even more powerful resource because thousands of people have created hundreds of packages meant to assist you in performing complex tasks.  In fact, in my nearly 3 years of continual use of R, I have rarely (if ever) encountered situations in which I actually had to write complex procedures for any standard statistical or machine learning algorithm.  For example, I was able to develop a multiprocessed, Random Forest based algorithm using mostly code pulled from CRAN.

In summary, I’m a huge fan of the R programming language. If you haven’t already done so I would encourage you to download a free copy and play around with it. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not as slick as a commercial package such as Matlab or S, but the power of open source has elevated R to be one of the most useful and valuable languages around.  Plus, isn’t it kind of cool to participate in InnoCentive’s Crowdsourcing process by using a resource that is, in and of itself, a product of Crowdsourcing?

Thank you, R.

Gabriel Eichler, PhD.

The winning video in the 2008 InnoCentive Solver Video Challenge

Earlier this month, InnoCentive launched its third video Challenge, seeking a video that showcases InnoCentive Solvers’ ability to change the world.   This Challenge is one of a growing number of marketing Challenges posted recently to the Marketplace, as Seekers  discover that the InnoCentive Solver Community is a great resource for “voice of the customer” input on products, branding and messaging and new commercial applications for current products.

We learned a few things from our first two video Challenges, and we put those learnings into the writing of this one.  For example:

Solvers know Solvers.  The best videos we received were from people who understood the Solver community and what they would respond to.  The cost to convene a focus group to attain the same results would have been prohibitive.  This is most likely also why we received so many more submissions for the Solver video than for the Seeker video – Solvers were more motivated to create something that they could relate to.

Our Solvers are incredibly creative. We know our Solvers are brilliant, but the creativity we saw in the submissions blew us away.  We realized that if we provided a bit more thought into how we wanted to use these videos, we would probably see submissions that were applicable for a wide variety of uses – some that we hadn’t even considered before.

Our Solvers love to help others. We knew this already too, but hadn’t thought to make “helping others” a core component for this Challenge.  Given that this is a known passion within our Solver community, and that passion drives people to accomplish great things, we’re hoping that adding this element will yield even greater results.

So how will we use these videos?

As we’ve stated in all of our video Challenges, we plan to use the videos in marketing campaigns.  When we said this with our first Challenge, we had no idea whether we’d actually be able to use the winning videos.  However, once we saw the submissions and selected winners, we started seeking out opportunities to show them.  They’ve been seen in sales presentations, at trade shows, on our web site, on our YouTube Channel, in media pitches – anywhere a video is appropriate.   People watching the videos – whether they are Seeker or Solver prospects, instantly understand the value of the InnoCentive crowdsourcing model.

With this Challenge, we’re in the unique position of being our own Seeker client.  It’s a humbling experience to say the least.  Seeing the Client Services team in action is inspiring – the volume of paperwork, questions and requests they receive is massive – yet they keep things running smoothly while managing many Challenges simultaneously.  All with efficiency, courtesy and a much appreciated sense of humor.

This Challenge is important to InnoCentive.   We want to know what our Solvers think about us, and how they would describe us to others.  We hope that these videos inspire more people to become Solvers – and get their chance to help change the world.

Jackie Bassett is founder and CEO of BT Industrials Inc., where she helps companies design innovation into their business strategies and processes, turning problems into profits.  Jackie is the author of “Drawing on Brilliance”, of which InnoCentive CEO Dwayne Spradlin said:

“Drawing on Brilliance is a guilty pleasure for aficionados of invention everywhere.  Packed with stories and hand drawn diagrams from patent filings for many creations we now take for granted, I found myself immersed.  Ever wonder where some of those famous ideas came from?  The comments in the margins from the inventors only help to bring a historical excitement to flipping through the pages.  How did Edison and Bell visualize their own creations?  This book is not only for inventors, but for those needing a constant reminder that creativity and problem solving are inherently human processes.  With the right creative spark, we all have the ability to change the world in remarkable ways!”

Can one person, with one crazy idea really change the world? Or how about just two people?  Or how about – just you?  What does it really take? Let’s take a look……

Two bicycle shop repairmen from Ohio solved a problem that no one else could: not even DaVinci or Galileo.  They weren’t even engineers. Yet their idea spawned an entire new industry that created millions of jobs:  Wilbur & Orville Wright.

How? Controlled flight was not a weight and balance issue like so many for centuries before then believed.  Increasing power only added to the weight, which required more power, which just added more  weight and so on – making the problem seemingly unsolvable.

Controlled flight was an issue of pitch & yaw: something bicycle shop repairmen understand better than anyone else.  They spent years reviewing every prior attempt at flight before they saw what the real problem was.  They then went on to solve the right problem!

Make The World A Much Cooler Place

W.H. Carrier, was raised on a farm and had to mow lawns and do lots of odd jobs to pay his way through college.  He started his company, Carrier Corporation, on a shoe string budget. His inventions enabled man-made control over temperature, humidity, ventilation and air quality soon raised the standard of living around the world forever!

Josephine Cochran thought she was married to a successful grocer but only discovered after his death that she was an impoverished widow.  Needing to support herself she took her idea for an automatic dishwasher to the world, toiling for several years until she found a market for it.  With no formal training she went on to win awards for “best mechanical construction”. Her company was eventually acquired by what is now known as KitchenAid, owned by Whirlpool.

Think Differently!

John Atalla, worked in a lab where three Nobel laureates were already hard at work looking to solve a complex problem. He said to his bosses, ‘Why don’t you let me look in the other direction where nobody’s looking?’  Looking in the opposite direction led him to create (PIN), the personal identification code and encryption system that permits us to access our bank accounts and make purchases without cash. He has always said ‘I attribute almost all my inventions to the fact that I will look in the path that people aren’t traditionally going in.’”

This is an economy where everyone can make a difference. So look at the masters of innovation for answers, drawing on brilliance.  Everyone can and must make their contribution – and change the world in remarkable ways!

Jackie Bassett
Co-Author, Drawing On Brilliance
jackieb@btind.com

There is a great article in the current issue of The Economist (also on their web site here) about InnoCentive, featuring one of our most innovative clients, SCA.  SCA is a Swedish company with 50,000+ employees and annual sales of €10 billion ($14.6 billion) that makes personal-hygiene products.  SCA has gone public with information about the actual value they have seen from working with InnoCentive – and the numbers are amazing – even we were a little surprised.  Of course this substantiates what we’ve been saying all along – that the power of crowdsourcing, and specifically tapping into our incredible Solver community, allows organizations to accomplish extraordinary things.  If you haven’t already, check out the article – it’s a great testament to InnoCentive, SCA and our amazing Solvers.