Perspectives on Innovation

The top rated “The Open Innovation Marketplace”, authored by InnoCentive’s Founder Alpheus Bingham and President and CEO Dwayne Spradlin has been receiving positive reviews from innovation practitioners, CEOs and executives, industry analysts and the media.  Though the book presents a comprehensive overview as well as a deep dive into the practice of open innovation, the authors still had more to share.  Below is a chapter that didn’t make it into the book, which we’d like to share with you now.  Enjoy!

Closed Innovation Suboptimizes Solutions – The World Can Do Better.
by Alpheus Bingham, Founder, InnoCentive

One of the expectations of my early career in the pharmaceutical industry was to design new synthetic routes (ways to make medicines). This was for a whole variety of molecules, not just the ones for which I had some special training and experience.  At various times it included heterocycles, beta-lactams, silanes, inorganic salts, and many others. When asked to undertake such a challenge, I usually did so based on my own grasp of chemistry and the aid of a technician or two to carry out the exploratory experiments. That is not to say I never sought help. In fact a small, informal group of seven or eight PhD chemists would meet weekly and share what they were working on in hopes to gain some insight and ideas from the others. I think my experience was typical in a commercial research environment.

Contrast the approach just described, closed innovation within an industrial organization, to a purely academic exercise from graduate school that was much more successful in exploring a wider range of potential solutions. In a synthetic organic chemistry course, taught at Stanford University and overseen by Professor William S. Johnson, 20 other “generally-accepted-as-swift” chemists and I were assigned one molecule each week. Our job was to design an appropriate synthesis for that substance, that is, ways to make the molecules much like the ones I would later be making in my work assignments. We were not asked to actually conduct the synthesis in the laboratory but to support each of our recommended steps with precedents from the scientific literature. This was, essentially, no different from the first steps I would later take in the synthesis challenges I faced as an employee. These weekly homework assignments were not simple problems. Each assignment required 20 to 80 hours of effort, and students generally dropped all other coursework while this one class was taken. Papers were turned in on Monday, and that Wednesday a special evening class was held, which often extended into the wee hours of the morning. (more…)

Daniel Castro recently won the Economist-InnoCentive Healthcare Information Economy Challenge. This Challenge was part of the Economist Challenge Series and as the winner, Daniel was invited to present his solution at the Economist Ideas Economy Information event, which took place in Santa Clara in June of 2011. Daniel’s winning solution can be viewed here.

I’m a senior analyst at a Washington, DC-based think tank where I work on a variety of policy issues related to information technology. Generally, I look at how different types of public policy can help spur the adoption and use of technology that help improve economic productivity and quality of life. My key focus is on information policy, such as privacy and security, and I am especially interested in how policymakers can help spur more innovation through the use of data.

Before beginning my career at the think tank, I worked at the Government Accountability Office (GAO) where I audited information security controls at various government agencies. Working in government gave me a great opportunity to see how government policies are implemented firsthand, an experience which is invaluable in my current job. My academic background is fairly diverse: I received a B.S. in Foreign Service at Georgetown University before switching gears and obtaining an M.S. in information security from Carnegie Mellon University. I have found that having both strong technical expertise and a background in the liberal arts has given me many opportunities to pursue the projects that most interest me. (more…)

Congratulations to Solver Daniel Castro for submitting the winning solution to the  InnoCentive-Economist Healthcare Information Economy Challenge. The Challenge asked for new and exciting ideas for business models that would support or enable a healthcare information economy for the benefit of patients, care givers and manufacturers of healthcare products. Daniel’s solution is below.

Information has the potential to radically transform health care.  Most of the investments that we have been making in health IT have been to improve the efficiency of back-office operations and to improve quality by ensuring that doctors have the right information about the right patient at the right time. But I think when we look at the potential of health IT we will find that these two components only make up a small piece of the pie.  The larger, more transformative, piece will be using IT in health care for knowledge discovery and medical research. But to do this, we need a vibrant health information economy.

My proposal focuses on solving two related problems: 1) how to aggregate and use medical data on an individual level, and 2) how to do this on a national level.

First, at an individual level the problem is that an individual’s medical data is in many places including with different doctors, pharmacies, hospitals and health insurers. We need in health care what Mint.com is for personal finance: a meaningful entity to assemble all of the different data points from different sources. Information-based sectors of the economy often depend on data intermediaries to collect and aggregate data. One way to do this in health care is by using health record data banks (HRDBs). HRDBs are data repositories of a patient’s complete medical history. They are more than a mere personal health record; instead they are the authoritative source of patient health information. In this model, patients or their health insurers would pay a small fee to the HRDB to store, maintain and manage their medical data. HRDBs, in turn, would pay health care providers a transaction fee for every “deposit” of information following a health care encounter. Patients would be free to select the HRDB they believe provides them the best quality and value. HRDBs would compete for customers by developing innovative tools and applications to allow patients to better manage their personal health information. Competition would also help promote high levels of security and privacy, and allow customers who place more value on these items to pay for premium privacy and security controls. HRDBs create the market incentives to allow data aggregation by better aligning the costs and benefits of investing in health IT. (more…)

This post was written by two Client Service’s team members who worked on the City of Boston’s SpeedBump Challenge: Daniel Kuster, Ph.D. and Michael Albarelli, Ph.D.

We recently posted a Challenge for the City of Boston, to solve the problem of locating potholes throughout the city (https://www.innocentive.com/ar/challenge/9932752).  We believe the StreetBump Challenge prototypes a very powerful way for a city to approach problem solving, by projecting the municipal problem to a global audience of citizen Solvers.   Such an approach will become increasingly attractive as data become easier/cheaper to collect and share.  As part of the InnoCentive team who worked with the City of Boston to formulate the StreetBump Challenge, we are happy to share our perspective on this type of analytical Challenge at InnoCentive in particular, and some observations about how to get practical value from data-based endeavors in an open innovation marketplace.

Potholes are everywhere, but Boston’s are particularly difficult.  The many freeze-thaw cycles provided by Boston weather, heavy traffic, and a diverse network of street features combine to make street damage a pernicious problem.  In the StreetBump Challenge, the City of Boston provides Solvers with data (acceleration, GPS position, etc) from an Android smartphone app and asks them to predict where street damage was located.  (more…)

We recently announced that the Assessment Research Centre at the University of Melbourne had posted a Reduction to Practice Challenge seeking the development of a software module to assess collaborative problem solving skills in schools. We asked Professor Patrick Griffin from the University of Melbourne to talk to us about this Challenge, Educational GUI for Collaborative Problem Solving. Patrick is the Executive Director of the ATC21S project.

Hello Patrick.  Thanks for talking to us about your Challenge. The Assessment & Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ATC21S) is an international project coordinated by the Assessment Research Centre at the University.  Can you tell us a bit more about this project and what it hopes to accomplish?

In our information-rich world, students will need not just competence in math, science and reading, but in a number of other skills that include new ways of learning with technology, new ways to solve problems, and new ways to communicate using social media. The world of education has not even begun to explore the possibilities of these new 21st-century skills. So the ATC21S project has taken on the task of developing new ways of assessing collaborative problem-solving and learning through digital networks. In doing so, we are attempting to shift the direction of assessment and teaching towards a model that is more suitable to the measurement and development of skills that people will need in the 21st century. (more…)