Perspectives on Innovation

Lumina Foundation recently announced a series of Challenges and a dedicated Pavilion on InnoCentive.com to spur innovation in areas that would transform higher education in America. The Foundation’s first Challenge, Design of Student-centric Websites for Open-Enrollment Colleges and Institutions, is underway and will close on April 30. Two additional Challenges were recently launched and are currently available on Lumina Foundation’s Open Innovation Pavilion. We recently spoke with Juan (Kiko) Suarez, Vice President of Communications and Innovation at the Foundation, about this exciting initiative.

Hello Mr. Suarez – thanks very much for speaking with us. For those not familiar with Lumina Foundation, can you tell us a bit about your work?

Lumina Foundation is an independent, private foundation committed to increasing the proportion of Americans with high-quality degrees, certificates, and other credentials to 60% by 2025 (we call this Goal2025). Lumina’s outcomes-based approach focuses on helping to design and build an accessible, responsive, and accountable higher education system while fostering a national sense of urgency for action to achieve Goal2025.

The Challenges you are launching support the Foundation’s new Strategic Plan, which includes some big goals for higher education in this country. Can you tell us more about the problems you’re addressing and the goals you’ve set?

We are solely focused on helping the country reach Goal2025. This strategic plan covers the time frame between 2013 and 2016. Over the years, we found that Lumina must play four roles in this journey to the goal: goal setter, framework developer, thought leader, and honest broker. We have published a plan with eight strategies organized under two imperatives: mobilization and design. Mobilization is aimed at getting different actors in post-secondary education (e.g., policy makers, education institutions, non-profits, and employers) to commit to serious increases in attainment of students that are considered “non-traditional” but represent a new majority in the 21st century: students of color, low income, first generation, and adults with some college credit but not a degree.

The second imperative, design and build, is aimed at redesigning key components of the current postsecondary system that we believe will unlock more capacity and better quality to serve those students. To give you an idea of the magnitude of the issue: America currently has only 40% of its working age adults between 18-64 with some sort of recognized credential or degree beyond high school. Our goal is to increase attainment to 60%, without losing quality (or even doing a better job with quality of learning). This means getting 23 million more people in the U.S. studying and receiving a meaningful credential, certificate, or degree post high school. We believe that credentialed learning is currency for individuals and the country. We can attract more jobs of the future, and grow our economy by $500 billion if we can have that done by 2025.

Many foundations would traditionally issue an RFP and/or award grants to address their needs. What prompted you to partner with InnoCentive and use crowdsourcing as part of your strategy?

We will continue to issue targeted RFPs and grants as our main vehicles to fund relevant work, but open innovation adds to our capacity to bring solutions from talented Solvers all over the world that otherwise we would never reach. Our agreement with InnoCentive is perfect for that, since they have the community, processes, and tools to make that happen in a very well organized and transparent way.

The Foundation’s focus is on higher education in America, yet many of our Solvers are from other countries. How do you believe our non-U.S. Solvers can contribute and provide value?
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The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and its partner Humanity United recently announced the first-round winners of the Tech Challenge for Atrocity Prevention – a technology competition enlisting Solvers from around the world in support of the White House’s effort to design new tools to help prevent and respond to mass atrocities. Seven innovations won first, second, and third place prizes ranging from $1,000 to $5,000; information about the winners and their solutions can be found here. USAID and Humanity United have just launched three new Challenges, one of which is being run on the InnoCentive platform and is offering a $20,000 prize purse for a Mechanism for Secure 2-way Communications During a Crisis. We recently spoke with Mark Goldenbaum, a Democracy Specialist at USAID, about the Tech Challenge series, the successful completion of the first two Challenges, and the newly launched Secure Communications Challenge.

Hello Mr. Goldenbaum – thanks for joining us today. Could you take us back a bit in time and help us to understand the genesis of the Tech Challenge series and your primary objectives for the program?

In April 2012, President Obama unveiled his comprehensive strategy to prevent and respond to atrocities at a moving speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial and Museum. I was lucky enough to be sitting in the crowd that day for the President’s speech, and it was an unforgettable thrill when he mentioned that USAID would seek new applications of technology to help with this issue. Of course, we had been working for several weeks behind the scenes to design an approach for doing just that. And whether I knew it at the time or not, the best thing that happened to USAID in that process was linking up with Humanity United (HU), a private foundation dedicated to this issue, bringing creative thinking and energy as well as contacts and deep knowledge of this field. Together, we committed to a “Challenge” approach that would help us identify innovative applications of new and existing technologies to the issue of atrocity prevention. As for the five problem areas that we chose to focus on, these were initially identified by USAID and HU after a series of internal consultations, but then greatly strengthened and refined by reaching out to broad range of groups and experts working on these issues to make sure these reflected real world needs and opportunities.

What was your primary motivation for crowdsourcing your Challenges (as opposed to using more “traditional” means such as academic research or grants to solicit ideas and solutions)?

Broadly speaking, both USAID and HU are interested in “open source development” processes such as these to engage a broader and more diverse community than we might otherwise reach. While the professional development community and human rights groups are doing inspiring work in their own right, the idea that other fields of research or industry might have technologies, approaches, or tools that could be easily adapted to advance development or achieve conflict prevention goals is incredibly exciting. Engaging universities, students, non-profits focused on other fields, the private sector, engineers, developers, and others has been a long-standing goal, and the emergence of platforms such as InnoCentive now give us the tools to more easily do that.

What’s your sense of the role that the NASA Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI) is playing in helping to guide other federal agencies in their use of open Challenges and prizes?

Clearly, there is a lot happening inside and outside of government related to the use of prizes and Challenges. Too often, we find ourselves having to recreate the wheel or repeat others’ mistakes that could have been avoided. As both a taxpayer and a federal employee, I was thrilled to find out that there was a dedicated resource created with the intention of helping other federal agencies and departments tap into a source of best practices and collective learning, and help them to better understand the state of the art. My grandfather was actually a Mission Control engineer with NASA, so I was predisposed to liking CoECI. But they have certainly surpassed my highest expectations, helping neophytes like myself better understand the industry, find the right partners, ask the right questions, and design our Challenges in a way that puts us in a position to find the best solutions. CoECI has been a great partner, and any success that we have is certainly in large part due to their assistance.

For your first two Challenges, you recognized seven innovations and awarded first, second, and third place prizes ranging from $1,000 to $5,000. What stood out among the seven innovations and differentiated them from the other solution submissions? (more…)

In June 2012, we launched Phase 1 of the My Air, My Health Challenge seeking to spur the development of personal devices that gather and integrate health and air quality data that is usable and meaningful to long-term health outcomes. Sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) [Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS)], four finalists were announced today to proceed to Phase 2, which entails building and testing a prototype sensor device and offers a $100,000 award to the winner. We recently spoke with Dr. David Balshaw, Program Director for Emerging Technologies at NIEHS, about the Challenge.

Hello Dr. Balshaw. Thank you for joining us today and congratulations on the successful conclusion of Phase 1. Taking us back, what were your original goals for this Challenge and how do you envision that the solutions currently being proposed will address the issue of airborne pollutants and their associated health risks?

In the environmental health research community, we always struggle with our ability to make direct connections between exposure to environmental pollutants and physiological responses at the individual level. While there have been a number of emerging technologies for exposure assessment as well as physiological monitoring, we haven’t seen many efforts to integrate these two capabilities. Combining the analyses of these data streams would improve those linkages. Ultimately, we wanted to see what creative solutions the community could come up with!

Over the last few years, crowdsourcing and prize competitions have become an increasingly popular means for government to innovate and promote strong public-private partnerships. What was your impetus for employing a crowdsourced competition model to achieve your goals for this Challenge?

The Challenge mechanism has really demonstrated an ability to bring innovative ideas into a new field. We thought this problem was an excellent fit because there are so many new technologies out there. Groups didn’t need to put a lot of resources into engineering, and there was a high likelihood of getting a useful device out at the end.

Phase 1 of the My Air, My Health Challenge attracted over 500 Solvers and generated dozens of solution submissions. What are your thoughts on the overall quality of the responses that you received? (more…)

PXE International recently launched an Ideation Challenge seeking evidence favoring one of two prevailing hypotheses for the cause of Pseudoxanthoma Elasticum (PXE). PXE International is a non-profit organization founded in 1995 to promote research and support individuals affected by this rare genetic disorder. We recently spoke with Patrick Terry, PXE’s President, about the Challenge.

Hello Mr. Terry – thank you for joining us today. Many of our readers may not be familiar with pseudoxanthoma elasticum (PXE). What can you tell us about this disease?

Pseudoxanthoma elasticum (PXE) is a rare disease affecting approximately 12,000 people worldwide. It is a recessive genetic disorder with signs and symptoms that mimic many aspects of the normal aging process, but at much younger ages, typically beginning in the second decade of life. Symptoms include macular degeneration, skin wrinkling, mineralization of blood vessels, and cardiovascular disease.

PXE International is a non-profit organization that has achieved a tremendous amount since its founding. Can you talk about the origin and mission of the organization?

Our  two children, who were 5 and 7 at the time, were diagnosed with pseudoxanthoma elasticum in 1994. We quickly discovered that, like most rare diseases, there was little research being conducted on the disease and no logical coordination of translational enterprise overall. We were naïve parents, with no science background whatsoever. As an engineer, I responded by learning as much as I could to be able to develop a project logic plan to solve the dilemma of their diagnosis. It was a clear expression of purposeful intent, creativity, and our neuroses as powerless parents. 

My wife and I founded PXE International within a few months of the kids’ diagnosis. By January 1995, we began working at night in a research laboratory at Harvard after we completed our normal schedule, and helped to discover the gene. As citizen scientists and co-inventors of the gene discovery, we became patent holders for ABCC6. We were able to convince the other researchers involved to assign their rights over to us and in turn we assigned our rights to PXE International to ‘steward’ the gene through all of the critical phases of basic and translational research. We went on to fully characterize the gene and develop a diagnostic test in a large research consortium. 

We also established the first lay-owned and operated blood and tissue biorepository, collecting clinical information and biological samples from thousands of patients and controls. We used the PXE Biobank model to create the open access cross-disease research non-profit entity, Genetic Alliance Registry and BioBank (www.biobank.org). We are currently intensely involved in human clinical trials, assay development, drug screening, animal model research, human epidemiological studies, and in exploring many avenues for potential interventions.

What are your objectives for this Challenge and what motivated you to crowdsource it through InnoCentive? (more…)

We recently announced the successful outcome of the Popular Science-InnoCentive Education Challenge. The Challenge, which attracted more than 1,200 Solvers from around the world, asked for lesson plans that could be used at the middle-school level in each of five areas of science that will be vital in the future. Materials couldn’t cost more than $50, and the lesson needed to fit into no more than three, 50-minute classes. We asked Jacob Ward, editor-in-chief of Popular Science, to chat with us about the Challenge and results.

Hello Mr. Ward – thanks for joining us today. Could you tell us about the genesis of this Challenge and what you hoped to accomplish?

For our annual education special — the September issue of Popular Science — we look for ways to inspire a wide range of readers. Our audience runs the age range from 10-year-olds all the way up to retired grandparents. So Popular Science, in collaboration with InnoCentive, wanted to run a Challenge that could conceivably affect all of these people.

The Challenge asked Solvers to submit lessons plan in five distinct areas – Bomimetics, fuel cells, polymers, climate change, and “big data.” What led you to choose these specific areas?

In the end, we wanted to come up with lesson plans for the future of science, out beyond what people are teaching today. We consulted with educators, futurists, and other experts to settle on five areas of growing interest, and that we knew had the potential to really revolutionize their respective fields. Biologically-inspired (biomimetic) design is a growing trend at the moment, fuel cells could truly overturn the power mechanisms we rely on today, and everyone’s talking about “big data” — we figured that if we could engage kids today in these areas, we’d be helping to pave the way to some truly revolutionary work when those kids enter the workforce in a couple of decades.

You posted the winning solutions (i.e., lesson plans) on PopSci.com, along with details about the second and third place entrants. What drove you to open the solutions to the public and what’s the response been like?

With a Challenge like this, it was incredibly difficult to choose a winning entry for each category, because we received so many inspiring and revolutionary ideas. So we figured that even though not everyone could win, we wanted as many lesson plans as possible to get public visibility. There were so many useful lesson plans submitted, and teachers need new lesson plans so badly, why not put them all out there?

Of the dozens of InnoCentive Challenges that have been posted to the PopSci Innovation Pavilion, we’ve seen PopSci provide significant lift – both in terms of number of Solvers and their submissions. To what do you attribute your readers embracing open innovation Challenges and becoming successful Solvers? (more…)