Perspectives on Innovation

With the new-year upon us, this is a time for family, fun and food! Having family members that love to cook (and are quite good at it) I’m always anticipating the next iteration of quiche or curry, hopefully not combined. Cooking is something many of us enjoy doing, so it was with great pleasure I stumbled upon an article about the Food52 website and decided to share it with our Solvers.

Food52 is a crowdsourcing website for people who love to cook: it is made up of a community of cooks initially signed up for the chance to contribute to the next cookbook by New York Times food critic and author Amanda Hesser and freelance food writer Merrill Stubbs’s by way of weekly, themed contests. Hesser and Stubbs will choose a list of finalists in each culinary category, but it is the community who will vote on the final selection of recipes to be included in the cookbook. In addition, the community will also choose the title, cover design and photos.

This is a truly crowdsourced project: participants contribute not just by submitting their own recipes, but also by editing others’ submissions with their own comments, ratings, and votes. Whoever made the finalist’s list will receive a free copy of the book and cookware specific to their recipe.

Hesser and Stubbs have finished the cookbook and will be published in 2010 by HarperStudio. However, they do promise that there are “more fun projects on the way, like video and photo contests!”

Check out the website – hopefully you’ll find a recipe in one of their 18 categories and feel encouraged to submit your own.

Adriaan Mol was one of the winners of the “Water Problems Affecting People in Developing Countries” challenge

Having worked for over 10 years for international relief and development organizations in Africa and Asia, I co-founded the social-enterprise BushProof in 2005 as a result of growing dissatisfaction with the long-term sustainability of charitable initiatives. With few exceptions, the measurable long-term impact of donor-funded NGO projects is discouragingly low, and over time I became increasingly concerned about this.

My own ‘aha’ moment came a few years ago in Somalia, when I worked for a project responding to floods in the south of this law-less country. We built several community-managed village water systems that purified contaminated river water. Before construction was even finished, a conflict broke out between various clans over the ownership of the systems. Eventually, theft of taps, refusal of the community to pay for guards and unwillingness to carry out very simple maintenance ensured that all filters were out of order within months of installation.

Before construction on the village units started, I placed a simple filter made from a plastic drum near the river, in order to test the filter quality of locally available sand. A number of local militia men were guarding some boats, and I asked them to continuously pour water in the drum for testing purposes. Naturally, they quickly ‘adopted’ the filter as their own once they saw that dirty water came out clean and fresh. Not long afterwards we had to evacuate for security reasons. Frustrated by the project’s failure to unite a violent and historically split community for the purpose of ‘community’ sand filters, I went to the river to collect the small filters. One of the guards asked me a filter as a gift, but annoyed as I was with the whole situation I curtly told him to pay for it or move on. To my surprise, the gunman returned within minutes with the 10 dollars I had asked him for – a substantial amount in that context. When I passed his house a few hours later, I found that his wife had established a small business selling clean water to her neighbors. Within hours several other people asked to buy small filters, but no more plastic drums were available…

This experience really opened my eyes. A gunfight breaks out in town over a free donor-funded village water system – but these same people gladly paid serious money for a privately owned solution. Thus was born the idea of applying entrepreneurship to solve some of the world’s most pressing needs: access to basic social services, such as drinking water or energy, which I and a partner eventually turned into reality with social-enterprise BushProof, and more recently ToughStuff, which sells affordable solar products to low-income consumers.

The opportunity to work towards poverty reduction through a business rather than a charity is very challenging but immensely motivating. Besides delivering true change, the most motivating aspect is the changed relationship with those we serve. Instead of passive beneficiaries, they are now my customers. This puts us on an equal footing, whilst forcing me to deliver true value they need most – otherwise they won’t buy it.

When I found out about the InnoCentive “Water Problems Affecting People in Developing Countries” challenge, I couldn’t resist sharing these insights and experiences: I truly hope they can be put to work and cause true chance in an environment which sorely needs more and lasting positive impact!

Best,

Adriaan

Last week, Michael Arndt from the Next Innovation Tools & Trends blog on BusinessWeek.com, posted an article asking “Is Open Innovation Over?” The crux of the post is an interview with James Todhunter, CTO of Invention Machine, who says “Open Innovation” is “becoming yesterday’s idea”. Todhunter’s argument was that companies’ internal knowledge-base would dwindle if they relied too much on external ideas and expertise, and run the risk of losing control of their IP rights and thus their competitive edge.

I mention this post because it elicited a bee’s-hive of comments criticizing Todhunter’s views, especially as they (the commenter’s) felt he hadn’t produced any viable examples to demonstrate his opinion. The commenter’s were rather passionate in their views and didn’t hesitate in listing why they felt Open Innovation, as one noted, “will become a natural component of companies’ innovation strategies.” Of note, and personal pride I might add, is an InnoCentive Solver, Chris DeArmitt, who chimes in his defense of Open Innovation in the comments, opening his statement with “As an innovator and two-time Innocentive challenge winner….”

Read the Next Innovation Tools & Trends blog post, http://bit.ly/5i0y22, and let both Michael Arndt and us know your opinion.

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.