Perspectives on Innovation

Hello everyone.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, InnoCentive’s new website is now live!   We’ve been working hard to update the site with both a new look and feel that we believe better represents today’s Solvers and Seekers and with a framework and functionality that is more flexible and robust.

With this new site, you will immediately feel the difference-it’s lighter, friendlier and, most importantly, it is richer in content than it was before. And it’s going to continue to get better and better rapidly over the coming months thanks to an open framework and content management system on the back end.

We also think you will start to see improvements and enhancements to key functionality that will make you more efficient and effective, as well as enable you to collaborate more easily and more often with improved Team Project Rooms (coming this fall) and more social media tools to help you connect when you want and with whom you want. The basic workings of the website will remain the same: your user information, your archives and your Challenges are exactly as you left them. We haven’t changed the processes you’re used to, such as signing Solver agreements, opening project rooms and submitting solutions, however we’ve tried to make them a bit more user-friendly, and will continue to do so.

It’s worth reflecting that InnoCentive is a marketplace that brings Solvers and Seekers to difficult Challenges. And our site reflects the complex nature of this relationship by providing sections for both sides of the equation. But we encourage you to look at the “other” side if you are a Solver or a Seeker, because there’s lots to understand and learn about how Open Innovation really works today.

With our new site, we’re working hard to make this complex area easy. Please let us know what you think. You can provide your feedback by clicking on the “feedback” link on the homepage, or by clicking on the “contact us” link on any page in the site.

We’re very proud of the new site – it represents months of work by the InnoCentive team, and valuable input that we’ve received formally and informally from Seekers, Solvers and partners alike. Thanks for your support during this process – we couldn’t have done it without you.

Best regards,

Dwayne Spradlin
President and CEO, InnoCentive

We recently announced a Challenge seeking cell lines for Chordoma, a very rare type of bone cancer.  We asked Josh Sommer, Founder and Executive Director of the Chordoma Foundation, to talk to us a bit about his Challenge and tell us why it’s so important that a solution is found.

Hi Josh,  thanks for being with us today and talking to our Solvers about your Challenge.

Absolutely – thanks for having me.

Your Challenge is seeking cell lines for Chordoma.  Can you tell us a bit about this disease?

Chordoma is a slow-growing, but relentless, form of bone cancer that occurs in the skull and spine in people of all ages. Because of their proximity to the brain and spinal cord, chordomas often cause serious neurologic impairment, and are quite complicated to treat. About thirty percent of chordoma patients are cured with surgery and radiation, but for those who aren’t, few treatment options are available, as chemotherapy is usually ineffective. As a result, the majority of patients will succumb to their disease within 7 years. Recently, a number of promising therapeutic targets have been identified which could offer hope to chordoma patients in desperate need of effective treatment options. Cell lines are crucial to evaluating these therapeutic targets and for testing and developing new treatments. Unfortunately, scarcity of valid chordoma cell lines has hamstrung the efforts of dozens of would-be chordoma researchers, and is severely hampering treatment development efforts.

Why have Chordoma cell lines been so difficult to find in the past? (more…)

Clearly, we will be reviewing the chain of events, doing post mortems, and second guessing for a long time to come all the events before during, and after the oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. There will be many points of view and they will differ greatly based upon your perspective. Corporations’ views will differ from environmentalists, lawyers’ will differ from engineers. And Gulf States inhabitants may have very different views than those from the Beltway in Washington D.C.

One area of focus will undoubtedly be whether we used all the tools at our disposal to respond to the crisis quickly and effectively. One might ask “Why wouldn’t we?” In reality, the discussion needs to be “What prevented us from doing so?”

More to come in later blog posts, but for now I thought it would be an opportune time to share some early reflections related to this oil crisis on this topic from my point of view. In particular, as we worked to energize problem solvers from all over the world to drive solutions for BP and the oil spill cleanup efforts, we and the world more broadly found it very difficult to pierce the corporate veil at BP to provide assistance. Even when BP provided vehicles for suggestions to be considered, it was clear that this was not a primary strategy. Most were not process, and frankly, the world was never given the transparency or tools by BP to fully participate in the process in the first place. Why was this so difficult and what can we learn? (more…)

Prodigy is an add-on Challenge feature that allows Seekers to increase Solver engagement on their computational or data-oriented Challenges.  When using Prodigy on computational Challenges, Solvers are able to get instantaneous and quantitative feedback on how well their solution fulfills the Challenge’s objective and how their performance compares with other Solvers.

When should I use Prodigy?

• Crowdsource analysis of any dataset
• Identify the best result or find the best analytical method
• Improve the attractiveness of your Challenge and set clear performance benchmarks
• Business Applications:
  • Market segmentation
  • Optimized product recommendation engine
  • Business analytics and analytical method development.
• Biomedical Informatics Applications:
  • Dx and Rx biomarker discovery based on clinical data
  • New target identification
  • Toxicology modeling
  • Virtual drug library screens
• Apply the Prodigy on proprietary data after masking it, public data or synthetic data

Most computational Challenges involve the dissemination of data for use in analysis or modeling.  The Prodigy works by asking Solvers to use those data to build a model and compare it to a “gold standard” (i.e. known answer, also provided by the Seeker) so that the Solver can track their success against the standard.  Scores provided by the Prodigy are typically a correlation coefficient that quantifies the significance of the solution found.

How does it work, continued:

• Scoring with any reasonably computed method: r, r2, RMSE, etc. are supported.
• To prevent gaming, Solvers are limited on their daily submissions to 5.
• Submissions which are not statistically significant are not displayed on the leader’s table.

InnoCentive introduced this capability to give Solvers greater transparency into the process and allow them to gauge their own progress against the submissions made by other Solvers.  Think of this as a scoreboard of success and intelligence. Seekers will have the benefit of getting the best possible solution out of every participating Solver as Solvers refine and improve their solution.  As the Challenge progresses, it is typical that the maximum Prodigy score will increase steadily until the end of the Challenge.

The days and weeks pass, and, until last week, oil continued to blast upwards from the bottom of the Gulf. As time marches on, the pace of new solutions has slowed as well, yet we still continue to receive submissions from you about how to stop the gushing oil and protect the coastline.

With the end of the Gulf Oil Spill Challenge in sight, we wanted to showcase an innovative solution that was submitted by a student from an Advanced Placement (AP) Environmental Sciences class from high school in New Jersey.

What I love about this piece is that it came from the leaders of tomorrow (students), it’s simple, and it focuses on the future (the clean up) even while many people and politicians remain focused on the past (blame) or the present (capping the wellhead). Here is the submission:

“Recently in our AP Environmental class, my teacher came in and told us about the oil spill.

He then told us about your website and began having us work on the clean up crisis of the oil.

All of the students partnered up and started to try out their ideas, if they had any.

I then came up with the idea to use baking soda, which led to some good results, and which ultimately led to an expansion of the idea:

We discovered that baking soda would create tar balls for a long enough period of time that you could place something underneath them, collect them, and drag them out of the water in tact.

So then my friend and I tried placing nylon stocking on the oil to see if it would allow the oil to pass through, and it worked.

Nylon stockings allow the oil to seep through, but they block the clean water.

The result of our tests culminated in our final idea, which actually cleaned up the water to near perfect quality:

• Place the stocking on top of the oil (the oil passes through this porous barrier)
• Sprinkle baking soda on the stocking and the oil
• Wait up to one minute
• Pull the stockings out of the water, which collects the tar balls and leaves the water nearly completely clean

We tested this in class on a large scale and we were able to accomplish getting the water clean.

I hope this idea helps in the crisis and we wish you the best of luck!”