Perspectives on Innovation

Today’s blog post was contributed by Gabriel Eichler, Director of Consulting for InnoCentive

Last week I had the pleasure attending the Economist’s Ideas Economy Conference on Information in the heart of Silicon Valley – Santa Clara, CA. As usual, the event was a star-studded (well ‘stars’, at least in the mind of this geek) event with representative leaders from government, big business, small business, public policy, not-for-profit and Academia.  A correspondent from the Economist emceed each session at the conference thereby ensuring that the content was top-notch.  The in-depth conversations on so-called ‘big data’, social media, crowdsourcing, healthcare and open government, just to name a few topics, were a virtual intellectual amusement park of entertainment.  Rarely do I have the opportunity to imbibe such high-caliber content.

As part of the event there were some particularly notable elements that I wanted to (attempt to) recapitulate within this blog entry.

As part of his talk, Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains spoke about how it is that us humans engage with information and knowledge. He brought up several interesting elements in his talk, but one struck me as particularly relevant. He said that studies have found that our brains actually have dopamine-like response to the acquisition of new data or knowledge. In fact our brains naturally crave such stimuli and the sort of high that ensues. Could this, perhaps, be one reason by Seeker and Solvers are so attracted to InnoCentive Challenges? Our Solvers love the opportunity, via a challenge, to find or create new knowledge and our Seekers love gaining new insights to solve their most precious Challenges?  I suspect that this may represent some of the non-monetary appeal of our Challenges – though clearly further study would be needed. As Solvers, do you get a high out of discovering information?  Do our Challenges provide that sort of an intense stimulation for you? Drop you comments at the end of this post. (more…)

Today’s blog post was contributed by Gabriel Eichler, Director of Consulting for InnoCentive.

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Economist Ideas Economy Conference on Innovation at the Haas School of Business in Berkeley California. InnoCentive was the Challenge Sponsor of the event. The audience was filled with an impressively diverse set of business, government and academic leaders all focused, in one form or another, on Innovation. Some of the more recognizable presenters were:

Hal Varian – Chief Economist at Google

Henry Chesbrough – UC Berkeley – Author and Leading Open Innovation Academic

Peter Schwartz – Co-founder and Chairman of Global Business Network

Scott Cook – Founder and Chairman of Intuit

Aneesh Chopra – CTO of the United States Government

Elon Musk – Found of Paypal, Tesla and SpaceX

Jack Dorsey – Founder of Twitter

Dwayne Spradlin – InnoCentive’s CEO

Diversity Prevails was a key theme that emerged from the conference. During his bit onstage, Elon Musk spoke about his development of the Tesla all-electric high-performance automobile and the rockets developed by SpaceX. In the Q&A session that followed, an audience member asked Mr. Musk how it was that he remained so innovative on his various projects simultaneously. Interestingly, it turns out that Mr. Musk credited his innovativeness by the very fact that he was working on the two very different projects at once. He continued to explain that his most creative ideas were the result of cross fertilization between the automotive and the rocket technologies he was developing. For the InnoCentive folks in the audience, this comment was not particularly surprising for us. This statement echoes the same philosophy that we here at InnoCentive hold to be an eternal truth of innovation – diversity of perspective prevails! Our community of Solvers has a seemingly endless resource of innovative ideas because it is so diverse. When we ask Solvers to innovate on problems outside of their core expertise, they’re much more likely to be successful than someone who already works day and night in that domain. That’s why it was a chemist who solved a problem about cleaning up oil and it was a radio engineer who figured out how to predict solar flare events. Diversity wins every time. (more…)