Perspectives on Innovation

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…)

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…)

Some of you may have noticed elsewhere an announcement regarding the recent publication of “The Open Innovation Marketplace” by myself, InnoCentive co-founder,  Alph Bingham, and InnoCentive CEO, Dwayne Spradlin.  We wanted to communicate directly with you about this bit of news because you are an integral part of it.  In this book, we often reference you and your contributions as we speak of a Solver population and the amazing capabilities of that network, punctuated with a few concrete examples.

But let’s back up and make clear that this book is not and was not intended to be “The InnoCentive Story.”  Not that such a book shouldn’t be written — just that, this is not it.  As Dwayne and I point out in the Afterword, “…there were a few areas …that we could not address sufficiently in the book. First was the desire to tell InnoCentive’s story from its founding to the present—and forward, to what might come next. Indeed the story is like no other, and is one that we love to tell … (and another missing piece) was the call for many more case studies telling the amazing stories of InnoCentive’s Solvers and their ingenuity and dedication in finding solutions to problems.  … there is no doubt that we are at the center of a hotbed of activity that is shattering all the prior notions of how innovation happens, how organizations should access and manage talent, and why people do what they do. We observe and facilitate unbelievably inspiring stories of the power of crowds to do everything from accelerating industrial research, to imagining new business opportunities, to accelerating cures for neglected diseases.”

But of course the experiences of InnoCentive and the impressive stories of Solvers could not be neglected altogether, and we point out in the preface that:  “As executives of InnoCentive, we have used our own business as a laboratory (italics added) for understanding open processes and for examining the way innovation is practiced by ourselves and our many customers and partners…” (more…)

Mario Alejandro Rosato is the winner of the second  Economist-InnoCentive Challenge, The Capture of Atmospheric Carbon to Address Global Warming. He presented his winning plan at The Economist’s Ideas Economy: Intelligent Infrastructure Event on February 16-17 in New York, NY.

I was born in La Plata, Argentina in 1961, to a family of Italian nationals. I built my first thermal solar panel at the age of 16 and as undergraduate assistant collaborated with several department chairs. I obtained a scholarship on renewable energy in Italy in 1986 and graduated in electric, electronic and environmental engineering in 1988.  Just a year later, I became a Professor of Renewable Energies. My thesis on wind turbine design was published as a book in Spain in 1992, sponsored by the European Community.

In 1990 I relocated to Italy and worked for several companies, sometimes in business areas that had nothing to do with my professional background. Research on renewable energies was the first love of my life and you know, one always remembers the first love…

I finally founded Sustainable Technologies SL in 2009 and a friend told me about InnoCentive. I decided to try and since then, I have been awarded a prize sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation (Rain Harvesting in Kerala) and one of The Economist on The Capture of Atmospheric Carbon to Address Global Warming.  Two prizes out of five proposals submitted, in a tough competitive environment. Quite stimulating, don´t you think?

Apart from InnoCentive, I won some prizes from Caixa Manresa and Innovacat and am currently (Feb. 2011) in competition for the Entrepreneur XXI Prize in Spain.

The good thing with InnoCentive compared to other similar competitions of ideas is that the anonymous proposal system ensures full meritocracy. In InnoCentive, your ideas are worth what they represent and contain, regardless of where you obtained your diploma or your nationality or ethnic origins.  Also for companies, the system allows consistent savings in R&D costs and ensures “out of the box” thinking, finally independent from the “academic endogamy” of many organizations.

Definitely, I will keep competing. Welcome and good luck to all!

In light of The Economist-InnoCentive Carbon-Capture Challenge, it is interesting to see the various ways sustainable infrastructure can be incorporated into everyday lives. And if ideas for green living occur through crowdsourcing, then the world must surely be heading toward a more self-sustaining way of life. I came across this the article about a crowdsourced contest (for a prize of $70,000) where the participants were asked to design the layout of a “mere” 420 square foot apartment in New York City. The photographs seem to be out of a science fiction movie set in 2323, where everything converts into something else. (more…)