Perspectives on Innovation

Solver since 2009

Occupation: Freelancer in pharmaceutical business research
Education: PhD in pharmaceutical technology
Residence: Japan
Challenges Awarded: 2

1. Definition of Region for Clinical Trials ($10,000 Challenge)
2. Literature Examples of API/Excipient Incompatibility ($10,000 Challenge)

I am a freelancer working in pharmaceutical business research domain. I first learned about InnoCentive in 2002 during my master’s program. Since then I have always been interested in InnoCentive, however I could not find time to work on Challenges due to my research work.

After my bachelor’s degree in pharmacy from Delhi University, I pursued my master’s and doctoral studies from the National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research (NIPER), Punjab, India. After completing my education, I worked for a Knowledge Process Outsourcing company in Delhi where I worked in the life sciences and healthcare division. Though I kept looking at Challenges, I could not focus on solving them because of time constraints. It was only after moving to Japan in 2009 and becoming a freelancer that I worked my way back to InnoCentive while visiting nature.com.

I attempted to solve problems not only related to my subject but also other interesting Challenges where I could fit my ideas perfectly. Initially, when I submitted my solution for an Ideation Challenge, I was never confident that I would hit the target. But the award for my first solution gave me the confidence to explore more and each Challenge brings with it bounty of learning and knowledge, whether I win or not.

Solving these Challenges gives me immense satisfaction and provides me with a chance to get my ideas out to the global community. InnoCentive has not only given me an opportunity to successfully apply my skills in solving Challenges but also created awareness. I strongly believe that knowledge never goes to waste and because of some Challenges I have become sensitive to issues which did not bother me before. At times we take many things for granted or do not realize the depth of the situation. Challenges posted on InnoCentive such as those related to PET bottle caps are not only interesting but also bring to light the underlying problems.

InnoCentive provides a very constructive platform for working minds from all over the world. Solvers are not limited by geography, profession, or educational background, so problems are seen with different perspectives. For Solvers, it is an opportunity to work on realistic and complex industrial issues which they may not face personally and also to look beyond their focus areas. There are no limitations or restrictions of how you approach the problem and it is totally upon your intellect and creativity to solve it.

Among the many other forums working on similar business models, I feel InnoCentive clearly stands out. Their staff is very supportive and the whole process from viewing the Challenge, to submitting the solution and then getting the award is completely uncomplicated and genuine. I sometimes wish I could know the real solution that answered the Challenge, especially for Ideation Challenges, just for curiosity’s sake. I am proud to be a member of InnoCentive family and hope to contribute in future Challenges.

Anjai Lal and Sahsa Vyash are the the winners of the third Economist-InnoCentive Challenge, The Economist-InnoCentive Entrepreneurship Challenge. They presented their winning plan at The Economist’s Ideas Economy: Innovation Event on March 23-24 in Berkeley, CA. This blog post is by Anjai.

I am currently a second year MBA student at the Yale School of Management. I graduated from Indian Institute of Technology in 2006 with a major in Electrical Engineering. Thereafter, I worked with British Telecom as a consultant where I was primarily involved in strategy and planning. At BT, I held a cross functional profile that spanned around Crisis Management, Strategy, Technology, Finance and Project and Vendor Management. I am passionate about the telecom/technology sector and am extremely interested in the emerging markets. I will graduate from Yale School of Management in May, 2011.

At Yale, my interests lie in Strategy, Finance and Technology. I spent the last summer with Zephyr Management, a Private Equity fund in NYC. I also interned with IBM in Business Performance Services. I head the South Asian Business Forum at the School of Management and am also a member of the organizing team of Asia Tomorrow- Yale’s premier student run conference. (more…)

HP recently released a news advisory highlighting the results of a fascinating innovation survey that the company commissioned. (The global survey included interviews with 312 executives in both commercial enterprises and the public sector during February and March 2011).

Some of the report highlights include:

1. Ninety-eight (98) percent of the executives surveyed believe that innovation will be critical to the success of their organizations over the next five years.
2. The most important reason to innovate is to facilitate future organizational growth (79% of respondents). For commercial enterprises, the second most important reason to innovate is to support profitability (74% of respondents); for the public sector, reputation is the second most important reason to innovate (59% of respondents). InnoCentive’s work with public sector organizations (e.g., Air Force Research Labs, NASA, In-Q-Tel and the intelligence community) in particular reveals that they are serious about finding solutions to problems that matter most to their missions, advocating public-private partnerships, and promoting transparency, openness, and collaboration across agencies.
3. Thirty-five (35) percent of organizations do not appear capable of measuring the success of their innovation efforts. This number is somewhat troubling and is probably low. Establishing a measurement framework with feedback loops and regular milestone checks should be a key deliverable for all open innovation programs and projects.
4. The majority of executives interviewed believe that they are innovation leaders in their respective industries, with 74% of CEOs indicating said leadership. Since the majority of respondents also indicated that CEOs are most responsible for guiding innovation efforts, it’s not surprising that the majority of CEOs self-report leadership.
5. Inadequate funding and technology were recognized as significant barriers to innovation. I’ll go ahead and add a few one more: A lack of methodology, process, discipline, and expertise. InnoCentive’s unique methodology, Challenge Driven Innovation, is an innovation framework that accelerates traditional innovation outcomes by leveraging open innovation and crowdsourcing along with defined methodology, process, and tools to help organizations develop and implement actionable solutions to their key problems, opportunities, and challenges. The key point is: Methodology matters.

Overall, some thought-provoking data courtesy of HP.

Today, InnoCentive and Popular Science are pleased to announce that we’ve joined forces and will be offering our Solvers and Popular Science’s audience of readers a new opportunity to engage in open innovation with the Popular Science Pavilion, to be launched in May of this year.  The potential of combining our global network of over 250,000 Solvers and Popular Science’s audience of passionate, creative and curious readers is something we’re very excited about.  We asked Jacob Ward, West Coast Bureau Chief of Popular Science magazine and the Bonnier Technology Group, to share his thoughts on what the partnership will mean for Popular Science.

To look back through the archives of Popular Science magazine is to read the history of innovation. Our magazine was founded in 1872. We’ve published writing by Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur and Isaac Asimov. We’ve covered the invention of everything from the telephone to the cell phone.

The common thread among all these stories is that individuals, or small groups, identified new scientific or technical challenges and came up with solutions to them. And to look across the breadth of the challenges we’ve covered, the fact that an individual or single institution managed to solve them is astounding.

In the May 1949 issue of Popular Science, our writers covered the struggle to get out of Earth’s gravitational pull. In the February 1959 issue, we wrote about the challenge of building aluminum car engines that would do away with the heft of iron or steel parts without, well, catching fire. And in the January 1981 issue we covered the attempt to create a single-blade turbine system for windmills—an effort to simplify construction that in the end produced too much noise and not enough power.

All of these projects obeyed what is soon to be an outdated mode of innovation. Each project involved a very narrow and isolated path from challenge to solution: one person bumps into the problem, and he or she develops, alone or with the help of their coworkers or friends, a solution.

But now the rise of technology has allowed us to reinvent that model. Popular Science is now able to actually facilitate—through our new pavilion, powered by InnoCentive and the power of distributed networks—the innovations that drive the future.

Imagine how different the history of innovation might have been if the people identifying the challenges could have posted a public call for solutions. Those rocket scientists who invented the step-rocket system of jettisoned boosters might have put out a call for ideas and pursued another line of thinking. The space program might have gone to the moon via some other form of propulsion entirely. The car companies that struggled mightily and expensively to create a self-cooling aluminum engine could have been saved the engine-fire headaches of the 1970s if they’d been able to ask the thinking public to solve the problem for them. And the wind-turbine industry could have created an inexpensive and enduring prototype for harvesting wind energy as early as 1980, using the designs of some garage tinkerer who’d been toying with windmills on his own.

The Popular Science pavilion will be a place for companies, universities, think-tanks, government agencies and other institutions to put their hardest and most critical problems in front of our enormous audience of amateur inventors, professional researchers and everyday dreamers. We’re confident that adding those readers to InnoCentive’s global Solver community will allow even more problems to be solved. And in the process, Popular Science won’t just be covering another innovation—it will have helped, in some way, to provide it.

There is a very interesting exhibition that recently took place in Geneva, Switzerland, that I believe would be of high interest to our Solvers. The 39th International Exhibition of Inventions, New Techniques and Products (aka “the world’s largest marketplace for inventions”), devoted to inventions – devices and products that range from useful to the bizarre – just took place from April 6-10th.

Inventors & innovators from around the world gathered in Geneva every year to highlight their “brainchild” products in the hopes of attracting buyers or investors. These inventors were either groups representing companies and universities, some were independent researchers and some were individuals, like our Solver “tinkerers,” who simply had good ideas that they took the time and effort to translate into prototypes and products. (more…)